Hegemonic Tyrant Courts Doom

Finding itself in Republican sights and with no Democratic power center to offer protection, National Public Radio is turning into an upscale version of Fox "News." Nevertheless, information still gets out if the listener is sufficiently attentive.



On July 5, NPR’s "All Things Considered" interviewed two warmongers for their views on the North Korean missile test. One was Ashton Carter, a Clinton administration Assistant Secretary of Defense, now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The other was Ambassador Christopher Hill, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Bush regime.

The Clinton DOD assistant secretary is coauthor of a recent article advocating a unilateral US military attack on North Korea. His first pitch on NPR was that the whole region, not just the US, is threatened by North Korea and that everyone should gang up on North Korea to make them behave. The NPR interviewer asked Carter to reconcile his multilateralism with his own recommendation for the US to unilaterally attack North Korea. Carter replied that North Korea’s missile was developed to attack us, so we had to protect ourselves.

When the NPR interviewer asked Carter why deterrence would fail with North Korea when deterrence succeeded in the case of the more powerful Soviet Union, Carter agreed that North Korea was not sufficiently insane to launch an attack on the US. So, if the US is not in danger of being attacked by North Korea, why does Carter want to attack North Korea?

The answer is, well, you see, if we permit North Korea to develop any weapon with which they might be able to stand up to us on some issue critical to North Korea, well, they might not do as we want them to do. Carter could not conceive of a world in which any country existed that might be able to behave differently than the US dictates.

Ambassador Hill agreed, but he came at it in a different way. Hill’s view is that it is China’s, Japan’s, and South Korea’s responsibility to make North Korea behave as the US wants it to behave. Both Hill and Carter agreed that no country, with the exception of Israel, has a right to any interests of its own unless it is an interest that coincides with US interests. No other interest is legitimate.

Listening to the pair of hegemonic maniacs, I realized that the US is the new Rome – there is no legitimate power but us. Any other power is a potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated before it gets any independent ideas. The US, however, is far more dangerous than Rome. Rome saw its world as the Mediterranean and, for a while, Northern Europe, but the US thinks the whole world is its oyster. The Bush regime is busy trying to marginalize Russia, and neocons are preparing war plans to attack China before that country can achieve military parity with the US.

Gentle reader, consider what it means when our government believes other countries have no right to their own interests unless they coincide with US interests. It means that we are the tyrant country. We cannot be the tyrant country without being perceived as the tyrant country. Consequently, the rest of the world unites against us.

How is the US, which has spent three years proving that it cannot successfully occupy Iraq, a small country of only 25 million people, going to control India, China, Russia, Europe, Africa and South America?

It’s not going to happen.

What it does mean is that the US government in its hubris and delusion is going to continue starting wars and attacking other countries until a coalition of greater forces smashes us. Even among our European allies we are already perceived as the greatest threat to world peace and stability.

Our power is not what it once was. We are weak in manufacturing and dependent on China for advanced technology products. We are dependent on China to finance our wars, our budget and trade deficits. How long will China accommodate us when China reads about Bush’s plans to prevent China from achieving military parity?

The Bush regime thinks that it can have every country under its thumb. Neocons are fond of proclaiming that it is a unipolar world in which the US is supreme. This is a fantasy, and it is rapidly becoming a nightmare.

Here

It's OK

Rosa Brooks: That's the GOP's big gun?

ACCORDING TO the media, Republican strategists hope to make the fight against terrorism a "campaign cornerstone" in the run-up to the November elections.






Great idea! If these same strategists had been around in 1932 during the Depression, they'd probably have urged President Hoover to run for reelection on the strength of his economic policies.

Why would the Republicans want to make their record on fighting terrorism a campaign centerpiece? It's been almost five years since the 9/11 attacks, yet a recent bipartisan study found that 84% of the foreign policy experts surveyed disagreed with the president's often-repeated assertion that we're winning the war on terror. Iraq has become a magnet for the world's aspiring terrorists; in Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent and security is worsening; Osama bin Laden remains on the lam.

Unless I'm really missing something, the problem is not only that the GOP anti-terror strategy has been largely counterproductive. Much of the time, it also seems impressively unfettered by logic.

Of course, it could just be me. Maybe the strategy is actually devilishly sophisticated and not incoherent at all.

Here are a few examples. You be the judge.

First, naturally enough, we want to kill terrorists. I get that part. But although we are allowed to kill terrorists, terrorists are not allowed to kill themselves. When they kill themselves — as three terror suspects at Guantanamo did recently and more than 25 have attempted in the past — their suicides are part of an unacceptable campaign of "asymmetrical warfare" against us. Go figure! Gotta hope Bin Laden doesn't catch on — if he realizes that self-destruction is the best way to fight us, next thing you know, he'll kill himself too. And then where would we be?

Then there's this: We want to interrogate terror suspects. Who wouldn't? In fact, we want to use "enhanced" interrogation methods (translation: torture) against terror suspects, and when it's inconvenient for us to torture people ourselves, we regularly trundle them off to foreign states that don't mind getting their hands dirty. Yet we don't want to release any of the remaining detainees at Guantanamo because we're worried that their home governments might … torture them!

And another thing: We want to detect terrorist plots and prosecute terrorists for their crimes. That's why we want to undertake ever more sophisticated electronic surveillance and why we want to create military commissions to try suspected bad guys at Guantanamo. But for some reason, the Bush administration prefers to do all this illegally, which I really don't get.

When you're contemplating programs that pose major potential legal problems (to put it charitably), why not get congressional authorization and follow the law? It saves you a big headache down the road — the kind of headache you get when the Supreme Court slaps you down hard, as it did in the June 29 Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld decision, which held that the administration's military tribunals violated both U.S. and international law.

Previous presidents made a fine art of seeking legal loopholes to do things Congress and the American people probably wouldn't approve of. This president has made a fine art of seeking illegal ways to do things Congress and the American people probably would approve of. But then … maybe President Bush thinks that thumbing his nose at our system of checks and balances is a form of asymmetrical warfare against the terrorists. As he's fond of reminding us, terrorists hate us because "they hate our freedoms." And following this weird logic, if the administration throws our freedoms out the window, maybe they'll stop hating us!

Or not.

I know, I know. Some of you will be shaking your heads now, saying, "Hey, give the Republican anti-terror strategy a little credit here. After all, we haven't had another 9/11-style attack, have we?" True. But if you think the lack of another major terrorist attack means the GOP approach to fighting terror is working, remember the old joke:

A guy is throwing sawdust out the window. Another guy comes along and says, "Why are you throwing sawdust out your window?"

"To keep the elephants away," says the first guy.

"But there are no elephants around here!"

"See? It works!"

But I don't want to be unfair. There's no denying that the Republicans' anti-terror strategy is having a real effect — in one area, at least. In its annual survey of global public opinion, released in June, the Pew Research Center found that people in 13 of the 15 countries surveyed see the U.S. war in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear ambitions. Overall, the study found, "America's global image has again slipped" and "support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies."

Was it something we said?

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Imperial racism

Racism, the ideology that came into full flower as a justification for European conquest of most of the planet, is now headquartered in the United States – with an annex in Israel. Tel Aviv is a very active annex.







There could be no justification for George Bush’s aggressions, without the underlying assumptions of racial superiority. Bush has committed multiple crimes against peace – a capital Nuremburg offense for which a number of Nazis were hanged. He is a war criminal, many times over. However, he will never be prosecuted in the United States, because of the pervasive ideology of imperialism, which is racist at its very core: it dehumanizes the victims.

Race is, indeed, a construction – a very convenient one when you want to take someone else’s property, or kill them, or enslave them. It is this construct that animates the American debate about foreign policy – or even domestic policy when it comes to “aliens” of one kind or another.
But it is deadly. It swarms countries, and consumes cities. Fallujah was flattened, with its main hospital the first target. Three hundred thousand people are now refugees in their own country, because of US actions, and an unknown number are dead. That is a war crime – but is not seen as such by most of the US public, who are under the sway of the ideology of imperial racism. The death of an entire city does not matter to them, because there were no real people there. Racism does more than color the situation – it defines it. How do you kill a city and call it victory? Why is this celebrated as a benchmark of “progress”? Is the assumption that the white man’s triumph is, inherently, progress?

Of course it is. That’s what imperial racism is all about. There are “enemies” and “others” who are not “Western” – a euphemism for “non-white” – the construct they keep making up every time they want to steal something.

The hard-right Israelis are very good at this game. They are on totally racial mission, and have made their construct. Jewishness is a race, in Israel, with rights that only accrue to Jews. We are supposed to believe that Jews have a right to shape Palestine in such a way that they always have a majority. How does that conform with any democratic principle?

Now the hard-right regime in Jerusalem is making war against the entire Palestinian society, destroying its infrastructure – its bridges, roads and energy facilities – to make all 1.2 million inhabitants of Gaza pay some kind of price. However, it is a price that can not be paid. The extremist Israelis are racial imperialists who are not looking for anything other than the mass elimination of a people from the land. They have invested the firing of tens of thousands of rounds of artillery into one of the most crowded corners of the world to achieve this purpose: but their motives are well understood by everyone who is not a racial imperialist.

Everyone, that is, except the (white) Americans, who eat this crap up. The uniform reaction of the American corporate media to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that something resembling the rule of law must prevail at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. installations, has been to frame the issue in domestic political terms. The Bush administration had been politically tarnished, was the conclusion: not that it had violated international law, and was in fact an outlaw among nations. The situation has been framed as one of domestic political peril for Republicans – maybe in November – but not how the U.S. gets along with the rest of the world.

In the same way, the Israeli “incursions” into Gaza and the West bank have been framed as defensive measures, even as the world’s forth-strongest military power relentlessly pounded a people who have virtually no military with thousands of rounds of artillery a day. As the entire world knows, Israel could not possibly have amassed such an amazing war machine, unless they had been subsidized by a superpower. And, of course, they were.

In the Arab world, and the larger Muslim world, the “incursions” are seen as alien invasions, and as a threat to their own societies. The Israeli Zionist project is never discussed in the U.S, and now it has become forbidden to speak of it. Meanwhile, a reign of terror exists in Gaza and the West Bank. The terrorists are the Israeli government and armed forces, but instead our own media keeps showing us pictures of a goofy-looking Israeli soldier, while a whole people are being strangled and bombed.

None of this could happen, if there were not racial imperialism, in which the Jews of Israel were considered “white” – and, therefore, had inherent rights. White Americans also think they have rights that not nobody else possesses. There is a connection between the extremist Zionist scheme and the umbilical cord of imperialism. Here is the result, that places the Zionist perspective and the “American” worldview in proper place.

Just as the Americans obliterated Fallujah, Zionists in Israel want to wipe out whole cities. Gaza City has to go. Up in flames. Member of the Knesset, Moshe Sharoni, taunted his Arab colleagues in the Israeli parliament. He said:

“We need to obliterate Gaza and call it the City of Murderers, the City of Terrorists."

This is the mentality of mass murderers.

But then, you can only murder real people. Imperialism kills non-people. That’s the nature of the beast. It can only act that way. Who is wagging this dog? Many of these people are from Brooklyn. American racism and imperialism are the same thing. It appears to have been efficiently exported.

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This article is the cover story from the latest edition of Black Commentator. Please comply with our Posting policy if you wish to comment on this article.

New al-Qaeda in Iraq leader is already jailed.

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the purported successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is in an Egyptian prison and not Iraq, a lawyer has claimed.






Egyptian newspaper Al-Masri al-Yawm has quoted Mamduh Ismail as saying he met al-Muhajir, also known as Sharif Hazaa, or Abu Ayub al-Masri, in Tura prison in Cairo, where he has been held for seven years.

"Sharif Hazaa [al-Muhajir] is in Tura prison, and I met him two days ago while I was visiting some of my clients," Ismail, a lawyer known for defending Islamist groups, told the newspaper.

Al-Muhajir is on the "most wanted" list issued by the Iraqi government last week. The US military in Iraq has put a $5million price on his head. The US army media centre in Iraq said: "We cannot comment on the news that ... al-Masri is in an Egyptian prison and not in Iraq, we have to clarify that from the Egyptian government."

The US military had announced after the death of al-Zarqawi that al-Masri had been appointed the leader of al-Qaeda's organisation in Iraq. The military said al-Masri was born and brought up in Egypt. He then went to Afghanistan, where he trained in bomb-making before going to Iraq in 2002.

Source

So if true, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the man that the US military claim to be the new evil nemesis that has replaced Zarqawi. Is in fact already in an Egyptian jail and has been there for the last seven years !

How convenient.

The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds

A Dig led by Nir Rosen








Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.

In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.


Continue reading this fascinating insight at the Source

Iraqi PM urges review of foreign troop immunity

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a review of the blanket immunity enjoyed by foreign troops following new allegations of violence against civilians by US soldiers.




"We have to review the immunity enjoyed by members of these forces or look for ways in which Iraqis can participate in the investigation," Maliki told reporters on his return from a tour of the Gulf.

"A lot of mistakes have been committed before Mahmudiyah that have caused grief and anger in the Iraqi people who cannot tolerate these brutal crimes for very long."

US prosecutors on Monday charged a former soldier with raping and killing an Iraqi woman and gunning down three members of her family, including a five-year-old girl, in March in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

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Go to Venezuela, You Idiot!

I don't usually take the advice of rightwingers. But I did this time. After receiving inflamed email messages from dozens of angry rightists that I should get the hell out of the USA and go to Venezuela, I accepted their challenge and flew to Caracas.

Read the full article Here.

Worthy reading

Whilst doing my usual rounds over the last couple of weeks, I have come across a few lengthy articles that are worth taking a a second look at.




The First is from the aptly named Everyone is doomed and is a wonderfully emotive piece analyzing in depth the view and attitude of Josh Block (from American Israel Public Affairs Group) in regard to his bizarre defence of the collective punishment of Palestinians. A must read for those that have been following the events in Palestine like me, with the utmost concern.

The Second is an excellent piece by Betmo over at Life's Journey . Its an exquisitely detailed look at world politics in order to establish how we as a planet got to the point we are at today. A wonderful examination of the big players on the world stage . You could certainly add to the list covered in the article and no doubt we could expand the time frame back even further in order to finish the Jigsaw puzzle . A great starting point for those wishing to examine modern political society and the myriad of intricate elements contained.

The Third is yet another wonderful piece by Peter from So much trouble in the world highlighting the tragic events in Uganda. As he so accurately states , Uganda is a place that certainly deserves a moment or two of your attention and Peter certainly presents a compelling case for the plight of the Ugandan people. An essential read for anyone and everyone of conscience.

Iraqi .rape victim was a 15 year old child

Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.




As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmoudiya, her mother told the neighbor.

Abeer told her mother often in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.

Fakhriyah feared the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there. Janabi said he agreed. Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing." Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter at Janabi's home.

Instead, attackers came to the girl's house the next day, apparently separating Abeer from her mother, father and 7-year-old sister. Janabi and others knowledgeable about the incident said they believed the attackers raped Abeer in another room. Medical officials who handled the bodies said the girl had been raped, but they did not elaborate.

Before leaving, the attackers fatally shot the four family members — two of Abeer's brothers had been away at school — and attempted to set Abeer's body on fire, according to Janabi, another neighbor who spoke on condition of anonymity, the mayor of Mahmoudiya and a hospital administrator with knowledge of the death certificates and of the case overall.

The U.S. military said last week that authorities were investigating allegations of a rape and killings in Mahmoudiya by soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 4th Infantry Division. The mayor of Mahmoudiya, Mouyad Fadhil Saif, said Sunday that the case was being investigated by the U.S. military as an alleged atrocity.

Janabi was one of the first people to arrive at the house after the attack, he said Saturday, speaking at the home of local tribal leaders. He said he found Abeer sprawled dead in a corner, her hair and a pillow next to her consumed by fire, and her dress pushed up to her neck.

"I was sure from the first glance that she had been raped," he said. Despite the reassurances he had given the girl's mother earlier, Janabi said, "I wasn't surprised what had happened, when I found that the suspicion of the mother was correct." The U.S. military has not identified the victims. U.S. military officials contacted this weekend said they did not know the names of the people involved or most other details of the case.

The military official pointed to one discrepancy in the accounts. Preliminary information in the military investigation put the age of the alleged rape victim at 20, rather than 15, as reported by her neighbors, officials and hospital records and officials in Mahmoudiya.

U.S. soldiers at the scene initially ascribed the killings to Sunni Arab insurgents active in the area, the U.S. military and local residents said. That puzzled villagers, who knew the family was Sunni, Janabi said.

Three months after the incident, two soldiers of the 502nd came forward to say that soldiers of the unit were responsible, a U.S. military official said last week. The U.S. military began an investigation the next day, the official said.

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Post for peace

A most admirable effort on this 4th of July has been made by Glenda from the land of Oz to try and encourage all free thinking bloggers everywhere to put aside a few moments in an effort to Post for peace.



Of course It is very unlikely that any desire for peace can or will be fulfilled by such an effort. But holding such commitment and passion for what you believe certainly does present considerably more effect and influence than many would be willing to admit. For a simple idea such as this, can and will spread like a positive virus and infect others into also making a stand.

I have watched this idea develop from the sidelines on a few of the blogs that I read and can not help but be impressed at the speed at which fellow bloggers have shown their willingness to help spread this positive virus that we could call hope.

Looking at the list of blogs joining in , the response seems to be most praiseworthy and I highly recommend popping over to Glenda's place to get access to the full list of all those taking part.

Do something positive today. If you have a blog then why not join them in this effort and if you don't own a blog, then you could spend some time popping into the sites (listed at Glenda's) and adding you're support to the many readers who have woken up today and decided to stand up for something they believe in.

BTW, Happy 4th of July to all the Americans out there. To the rest of the planet, have a lovely and insignificant early in July type of day.

True Lies (3 min video)

Rosa Brooks: Did Bush commit war crimes?

THE SUPREME Court on Thursday dealt the Bush administration a stinging rebuke, declaring in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that military commissions for trying terrorist suspects violate both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.





But the real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda — a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect noncombatants — including prisoners — in times of armed conflict. But as the administration has repeatedly noted, most of these protections apply only to conflicts between states. Because Al Qaeda is not a state, the administration argued that the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war on terror. These assertions gave the administration's arguments about the legal framework for fighting terrorism a through-the-looking-glass quality. On the one hand, the administration argued that the struggle against terrorism was a war, subject only to the law of war, not U.S. criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, the administration said the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda, which put the war on terror in an anything-goes legal limbo.

This novel theory served as the administration's legal cover for a wide range of questionable tactics, ranging from the Guantanamo military tribunals to administration efforts to hold even U.S. citizens indefinitely without counsel, charge or trial.

Perhaps most troubling, it allowed the administration to claim that detained terrorism suspects could be subjected to interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law, such as "waterboarding," placing prisoners in painful physical positions, sexual humiliation and extreme sleep deprivation.

Under Bush administration logic, these tactics were not illegal under U.S. law because U.S. law was trumped by the law of war, and they weren't illegal under the law of war either, because Geneva Convention prohibitions on torture and cruel treatment were not applicable to the conflict with Al Qaeda.

In 2005, Congress angered the administration by passing Sen. John McCain's amendment explicitly prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees. But Congress did not attach criminal penalties to violations of the amendment, and the administration has repeatedly indicated its intent to ignore it.

The Hamdan decision may change a few minds within the administration. Although the decision's practical effect on the military tribunals is unclear — the administration may be able to gain explicit congressional authorization for the tribunals, or it may be able to modify them to comply with the laws of war — the court's declaration that Common Article 3 applies to the war on terror is of enormous significance. Ultimately, it could pave the way for war crimes prosecutions of those responsible for abusing detainees.

Common Article 3 forbids "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The provision's language is sweeping enough to prohibit many of the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration. That's why the administration had argued that Common Article 3 did not apply to the war on terror, even though legal experts have long concluded that it was intended to provide minimum rights guarantees for all conflicts not otherwise covered by the Geneva Convention.

But here's where the rubber really hits the road. Under federal criminal law, anyone who "commits a war crime … shall be fined … or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death." And a war crime is defined as "any conduct … which constitutes a violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva." In other words, with the Hamdan decision, U.S. officials found to be responsible for subjecting war on terror detainees to torture, cruel treatment or other "outrages upon personal dignity" could face prison or even the death penalty.

Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, of course. For prosecutions to occur, some federal prosecutor would have to issue an indictment. And in the Justice Department of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales — who famously called the Geneva Convention "quaint" — a genuine investigation into administration violations of the War Crimes Act just ain't gonna happen.

But as Yale law professor Jack Balkin concludes, it's starting to look as if the Geneva Convention "is not so quaint after all."

Source

Israel : The government is losing its reason

By Haaretz Editorial








Bombing bridges that can be circumvented both by car and on foot; seizing an airport that has been in ruins for years; destroying a power station, plunging large parts of the Gaza Strip into darkness; distributing flyers suggesting that people be concerned about their fate; a menacing flight over Bashar Assad's palace; and arresting elected Hamas officials: The government wishes to convince us that all these actions are intended only to release the soldier Gilad Shalit.

But the greater the government's creativity in inventing tactics, the more it seems to reflect a loss of direction rather than an overall conception based on reason and common sense. On the face of it, Israel wishes to exert increasing pressure both on Hamas' political leadership and on the Palestinian public, in order to induce it to pressure its leadership to release the soldier. At the same time, the government claims that Syria - or at least Khaled Meshal, who is living in Syria - holds the key. If so, what is the point of pressuring the local Palestinian leadership, which did not know of the planned attack and which, when it found out, demanded that the kidnappers take good care of their victim and return him?

The tactic of pressuring civilians has been tried before, and more than once. The Lebanese, for example, are very familiar with the Israeli tactic of destroying power stations and infrastructure. Entire villages in south Lebanon have been terrorized, with the inhabitants fleeing in their thousands for Beirut. But what also happens under such extreme stress is that local divisions evaporate and a strong, united leadership is forged.

In the end, Israel was forced both to negotiate with Hezbollah and to withdraw from Lebanon. Now, the government appears to be airing out its Lebanon catalogue of tactics and implementing it, as though nothing has been learned since then. One may assume that the results will be similar this time around as well.

Israel also kidnapped people from Lebanon to serve as bargaining chips in dealings with the kidnappers of Israeli soldiers. Now, it is trying out this tactic on Hamas politicians. As the prime minister said in a closed meeting: "They want prisoners released? We'll release these detainees in exchange for Shalit." By "these detainees," he was referring to elected Hamas officials.

The prime minister is a graduate of a movement whose leaders were once exiled, only to return with their heads held high and in a stronger position than when they were deported. But he believes that with the Palestinians, things work differently.

As one who knows that all the Hamas activists deported by Yitzhak Rabin returned to leadership and command positions in the organization, Olmert should know that arresting leaders only strengthens them and their supporters. But this is not merely faulty reasoning; arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state.

The government was caught up too quickly in a whirlwind of prestige mixed with fatigue. It must return to its senses at once, be satisfied with the threats it has made, free the detained Hamas politicians and open negotiations. The issue is a soldier who must be brought home, not changing the face of the Middle East.

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