So they're evacuating all the foreign nationals
In the meantime Israel has called up their reserve troops
are they about to wage a MASSIVE war once the western 'human shield' is out of the way?
Why isn't anyone putting a stop to this madness?
what happens next?
maybe Israel is worried that Syria will get
involved? less risk for the Syrians if the Westerners are out of the way...
This was always my favourite round on Question of Sport.
I reckon Israel, goes to catch the ball but trips over the boundary rope and the ball lands on their head.
I was trying to link it thusly somehow, but then I decided it might cheapen an otherwise serious topic.
If I'd thought about the ball-landing-on-head gag I might have done it, though
If ever a thread needs cheapening,
I'm your man.
the Americans are forced out of Iraq.
Afghanist becomes ungovernable.
There's a radical islamic cue in Pakistan
Iran gets the Bomb
India invade Kashmir
Oil Prices sky rocket.
Saudi Arabia and Venezuela slow their oil supply to America.
Russia bombs the shit out of Chechnya while no ones is looking.
At least two major European cities have bombings in the next 6 months.
Isreali move into Gaza.
Syria takes back Lebanon.
Kurds attack government buildings in Eastern Turkeys.
Basque sepratists suddenly start bombing again.
China starts up war games near Taiwan.
Korea launches a non-nuclear missle that gets as far as Hawaii
Japan's suffers a recession.
Cameron gets elected.
They find out 9/11 was a government plot.
best see
http://drownedinsound.com/content/view/1009157
so
it's all looking peachy, then?
russia hasn't relentlessly bombed chechnya for a while ... oh, and you missed out 'sunderland lose on penalties in the play-off semi final' ... but i'll let you off.
the most important thing is that Mubarak's government will fall and the Muslim Brotherhood will take control. That's when i'm moving to Finland.
the only way to stop israeli agression is to internationalise the border. but then hezbollah will hide behind foreign troops while they rearm. so it's difficult really to know what anyone can do.
what if
Hezbollah are integrated in to the legitimate Lebanese Army? Would that solve anything or would it just provide an excuse for Israel to 'legitimately' wage war on their neighbour?
if the lebanese army were firing rockets at Haifa, would that not give israel the legitemate right to attack?
I believe Hezbollah starting firing rockets
AFTER Israel began their military assault
OK - this is academic
I was wondering about a possible solution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Israel-Lebanon_crisis
At 9:05 AM local time on 12 July 2006[2] Hezbollah's military wing launched a barrage of rockets and mortars on Israeli military positions and northern Israeli village of Shelomi, apparently as a diversion, lightly wounding five civilians in the process.[10] A force of infiltrators then attacked two armoured IDF Humvees patrolling along the Lebanese border road near the Israeli village of Zar'it with anti-tank rockets killing three soldiers, wounding three, and taking two in captivity to Lebanon's territory. Hezbollah has named this operation "Truthful Promise."
hmm
that was an operation against Israeli military - not firing rockets on civilians in Haifa
rocketing shalomi isn't an operation against the israeli military
true
but then the village of Shalomi is in the disputed Shebbah farms region so it could be argued (depending on your point of view) that these Israelis (military or otherwise) were on the Lebanese side of the border
but like I said - these arguments are academic given the situation that we're in now
not to mention the situation in Gaza
well, i'll side with the UN over Shebbah farms .... have you a solution? i've already said i don't believe there is one.
I wish I did have a solution
Total global disarmament?
not in my lifetime...
conflict is part of the human condition. as is capitalism.
sure
but it would be less destructive to have conflicts that involved no more sophisticated weaponry than a sword
at least then you would actually have to have the psychotic impulse to chop down your foe rather than be programmed how to push a button in order to evaporate a depersonalised phantom enemy
oh, i quite agree. but people shouldn't believe that there will ever be a time when there aren't conflicts .. there is the implicit assumption that humanity is becoming or will become increasingly civilised particularly as we advance technologically but the current israeli agression shows that new technology is just put to old ends in a more devestating fashion. or something.
yes
this is one of the philosophical debates that crop up in determining whther there will ever be any communication with any other intelligent life in the universe
ie that a civilisation couldn't possibly reach the technological level of achieving interplanetary travel without blowing themselves up in the process - unless they were a totalitarian society etc.
but I digress
is the problem in both lebanon and palestine not one of inadequate administrative state capacity? The provision of services for law enforcement and dispute resolution is a market like any other, after all. There has been insufficient efforts to bolster the capacity of these states in a time when the market for law and order was highly competitive. paramilitary gansters in both territories have beaten the state into forcing the market into a monopoly equilibrium. a huge chunk of lebanon is stateless and the same can be said for palestine. neither state can provide security or practise diplomacy with their neighbours, particularly when they are as belligerent as Israel.
I think that is part of the problem
and possibly even the root of the problem if what you're saying is that the State of Israel has had US dollars poured into it and that Lebanon and Palestine have had Arab arms trickle into it
but I'm not quite sure of the sublteties of your statement
can we take it down there
vvvvvvvvv
maybe rephrase it a little
but no, i don't think there is a solution
nah,
dont know too much about the situation but i'd hazard a guess that the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah have very different agenda's, therefore they could never be integrated.
well, the lebanese army is apolitical ... it's agenda reflects that of the nominally democratic lebanese government. that said, i've always wondered if Hassan Nasrallah would win the presidency if the Lebanese constitution was reformed to allow non-Christians to run. What do you think anschul?
I think that if they held the election now
He definitely would win
this is the perversity of the current Israeli agression - they threaten (and carry out this threat) "to bomb Lebanon back twenty years" whilst neglecting the obvious fact that it was precisely 20 years ago during the bombing of Lebanon that Hezbollah was formed as a resistance movement
and anyone in Lebanon who would have once given Israel the benefit of the doubt is more likely to sympathise with Hezbollah, now. really, the international community should have been more committed to statebuilding in lebanon after the syrian withdrawal last year. and the lebanese government should have been less tolerant of having a third of their territory governed by a paramilitary force.
^ I agree
It is lunacy for Israel to invade.
He may be a bastard, but Sharon wouldn't even CONSIDER such a venture a second time.
fullerov,
should israel have released their lebanese prisoners on withdrawing from lebanon?
Yes
Oh dear
someone just sent me this link
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbocaj/192436679/
Just disgusting
what the fuck ....
That is
one of the most unpleasant things I have ever seen.
Seriously fucked up.
yup
and there's a whole bunch more here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12011945@N00/
doesn't encourage peace
I bet lebanese kids write on Hezbollah's rockets...:(
yup
what hope for the future of the world if this is the (heavily armed) next generation
:(
Not much
perhaps one day they will understand the principle of cutting your losses...
I've just came home from a friends house
where we were watching the news and commenting on how politicians will condemn Hezbollah but will call the Israeli blockade a rightful act of defence. We then commented on how antisemitism is thrown at anyone who dares criticise any excessive acts by Israel. I then linked to this photo to see anyone who was disturbed by it being called a jealous antisemite. My feelings are with the jews and Israelis who have minds of their own don't go for kneejerk reactionary gestures, as my feelings are with those on the other side in the same position. The murderers of civilians have been in charge of both sides for too long. Why can't people just fucking get along and leave each other in peace ?
sadly
because the people who make BILLIONS in arms deals wont let them
I think it says something also that the two Israelis who I have seen interviewed who have said that the Israeli offensive is plain wrong are the two fathers of the soldiers captured by Hezbollah
what do you make of that?
"because the people who make BILLIONS in arms deals wont let them"
you don't seriously believe that do you ?
it's an extremely simplistic version of what I believe
but essentially yes, I do believe it
but there was conflict long before expensive advanced weapons ...
but now there is an enormous market for conflict
which is fuelled by weapons manufacturers
i think that's incidental. i don't think it's a cause of conflict
I disagree
the rabid bravado of either side would be significantly less if they weren't armed to the teeth
if there wasn't an arms industry, wouldn't people just arm themselves?
in actual fact, that's what should happen. the international trade of arms should be absolutely prohibited.
I entirely agree!
"I see the Stop the War Coalition are holding a demo against the Israeli attacks on Saturday. See http://www.stopwar.org.uk
Looking through the Stop the War website, I can't help but feel that the overall tone of their statements perfectly sum up the dire state of the British left. Acres of condemnation for the Israelis, but not a single word of criticism about Hizbollah's firing of rockets into Israel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm appalled by the current turn of events, but it's the sheer one-sidedness of Stop the War's press releases that means I won't be joining the protest march. If the theme was something like "Israel: Stop Bombing Lebanon. Hizbollah: Stop Firing Rockets Into Israel", then I'd happily march with that, but I won't march alongside people going "omg down wiv teh ZION1STZ!!!!!!!11!!!ONE!!!!!!!ELEVENTY!!!!!11111"
There's a perfect example of what I'm talking about halfway down the Stop the War front page, in an interview with a Lebanese student.
Regardless of Hizbullah's strategies, beliefs and aims, whether we agree with them or not, by international law, a resistance group has a right to capture people for the purpose of exchanging prisoners with the enemy.
What the hell is this? The Stop the War (But It's Okay To Take Hostages) Coalition?
This is why I don't go on anti-war marches any more."
it is unfortunate
that in almost any situation it is often the fringes that shout the loudest - at university there was only one group that appalled me more than the champagne swilling, jowl-shaking piglets in the young conservatives and that was the socialist worker crowd
:(
Having said that there really is a problem with the obsession of having to condemn both sides equally when the actions they carry out are entirely unequal - even more so when one side is carrying out collective punishment on an entire nation as a strategy for a wider war under a false pretext ...
what is the false pretext?
sorry, i should rephrase that. what do you believe their real motivation to be?
and yeah, the SWP should be drowned. i was stopped in newcastle a few weeks ago by a petitioner talking about Palestine and he said "the US backs Israel because it wants their oil" .... honestly, i think people are driven to far-left student politics because they're intellectually lazy and it just involves the absorption of a few straightfoward soundbytes.
SWP should be drowned?
Come now, he had a bad season and his dad's a nobber, but drowning???!
hahaha. it's good to know it's not just me and anschul reading this thread, anyway.
well
from day one (last week) the Israelis and the US have been shouting about Syria and Iran
How convenient considering they have been shouting about Syria and Iran for some years now
And Israel has been involved in hundreds of prisoner exchanges in the past - why suddenly the zero tolerance attitude?
I think part of the motivation is also to distract the focus from their 5month long siege of Gaza and their kidnapping of democratically elected Government officials from the Palestinian authority
and also to attempt to divide the arab states into disagreement with each other and potentially destabilise their neighbours
"why suddenly the zero tolerance attitude?"
change of president? the fact that it's hezbollah?
i dunno. would this have happenned if Syria hadn't withdrawn from lebanon last year?
Change of President
now that IS an interesting one...
I'm not at all convinced that Olmert has any more control over the IDF than Siniora has over Hezbollah
which is a worry
You could also
say that the other side started it...
It seems fair to condemn both.
to talk about who started it
reduces it to a schoolyard scrap
there are so many factors...
isn't 'who started it' the most fundmanetal debate in the arab-israeli conflict?
it's a distraction though isn't it?
who started it?
maybe that's why 'the debate' hasn't moved forward
human beings are instinctively reciprocal though. so both want revenge.
that said, the israeli withdrawal from the west bank was met with the election of hamas. so maybe i'm wrong ...
I really don't think so
I was genuinely hopeful in late 2005 that things could be achieved towards a peace, or at least an approximation of it.
Unfortunately too many people are bent on a total victory, which cannot be achieved...
I know Le Freak said this is far more words
But it really does seem that this conflict could be the catalyst for something much, much bigger
'Our' generation cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like for both the Lebonese and Israeli civilians right now. There trapped in the midst of an inevitable conflict which worsens day by day, and which appears to have no resolution in sight
It's amazing how something so far away in physical terms can potentially have ramifications for people all over the world
I'm actually shitting my pants
So
what do we think the Lebanese President should do? It seems to me he is in a bit of a lose-lose situation.
And I think my job is stressful
I think he should
um, err, shit I really don't know
good question
I'd guess he's praying a lot
Maybe he should wait until Condi Rice gets there and hold her hostage until there is a ceasefire - I bet that would work (in the short term)
wow - what a question
y'know that norman johnson column in the guardian is a satire of david aaronovitch? i must admit, i never thought it was particularly clever or accurate until aaronovitch's column this week in the times (on the subject of israel v hezbollah) began "i was enjoying a barbecue on sunday afternoon ..."
and he said "if israel's response is disproportionate, then so was Britain's action in the Falklands" ...