Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

Here’s my thought on the media: they suck. Since there wasn’t anything interesting enough for the media anymore, they dropped the situation Lebanon off the face of the earth. that makes me not want to ever listen to it anymore, because as soon as something slightly more interesting comes up, they move straight to it… oh well..  I still get my interesting news from my dad, so here’s today’s little snippet for that:

As for us here, things are in a freezing mode, and no one can predict what will come next as all are still on the highest alert status, and you hear from one side or the other that they are preparing for another round! So say that it will be regional this time, meaning Iran and Syria can be involved, and there are some news that the “”Lebanese forces”” started to re-train… so does it mean that we will get back to the civil war??  Who knows… 

As for the business, there is nothing still, so I am not going to the office because I don’t want to spend fuel without getting anything back…I go there once a week to see if there is anything special that I should do… and this situation applies to most business in the country…  just for your information, our sales the whole last month was about $ 200 … yes just two hundred, and I had to pay Milia’s salary which is about 3 times this amount not to mention the other expenses… so, this is the situation…. We are opening till 2:00 PM and sometimes there is no electricity, so we leave even a bit earlier…  days pass without a single phone call or a door open which is really depressing! But all is beyond control.

Yesterday, Rami, Nissrine Doris Teta salwa, and Pat and Mich came to us and spend the night and all the day today… and now Nadim and Randa will follow to we can do so food on the saj just to refresh ourselves a bit, and try to be distracted from thinking about the situation we are in ! 

so … do you think it’s over yet? People living in Lebanon don’t seem to think so, so all we can do now is keep your fingers crossed to see what’s going to happen.

So I haven’t posted in a couple of days, and that is mostly because i have not really heard anything interesting that is different than what the news has been saying. there is a cease fire, though all the barricades are still in place, and the country is in chaos of course.

My parents are doing ok, still hangin’ in there, though dealing with all the deficiencies in resources, just like everyone else.

This morning, my dad sent me an article that was in the Washington Post that stated some stuff about the intention of the US in Lebanon. I thouhgt it was interesting. make of it what you will

THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

Summary:

The war on Lebanon of July 2006 presents a much-awaited opportunity for The United States to place a ‘robust enough’ force in southern Lebanon
along the Tapline route connecting Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s oilfields to the Mediterranean. In this way the US secures a vital route and prepares
the ground for Syrian-Israeli talks.

US goals in Lebanon:

In Lebanon, the US is intent on securing the vital — and only — pipeline route that connects the Saudi and Iraqi oil fields to the Mediterranean, and onto the lucrative European market as part of a longstanding strategy  to beat Russian energy sales to the EU.

On its way to the Mediterranean refineries of Zahrani south of Sidon, Tapline crosses through the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights and into the heartland of the Lebanese south.  To ensure the safe passage of oil through Tapline, the US seeks to bring regional stability by coercing Israel and Syria to resolve the Golan dispute and solve the border and resource disputes between Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. The current war seems to be a step in that direction.

Following several years of pressure on both Israel and Syria, including stripping Syria of its influence on the Lebanese government while simultaneously exposing the role of the Israeli lobby in determining US foreign policy, there remain three issues before the negotiations can resume on US terms:

First, the US needs a pretext to place troops in southern Lebanon — and eventually the Golan – to secure the route. Israel has adamantly resisted
this option for years, sometimes even mobilizing its domestic partners in the US to oppose such moves.

Second, the US needs to stabilize the route by adjusting the power balance by weakening Hizballah’s military capability so that the US-backed Lebanese army could control all of the country including the areas controlled currently by Hizballah.

Third, the US needs to ensure that its presence in the area is accepted – if not called for — by all the parties involved. From the Lebanon side, for years US funded NGOs have been active in the south, in what seems to be a prescient sense of positioning of US ‘public diplomacy’ with the local population. (Today, the multinational force of about 7,000 will be dominated by NATO forces, including Turkish troops, with token contingents from Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia and Russia. The actual US role today seems to be limited, but it might change during the course of the resolution. The main base will be near the port of Sidon, and another logistical base may be established near Tripoli). From the Israeli side, preventing Hizballah rocket fire will be the primary role of the US-led force and will be tolerated only if it appears ‘robust enough’ to do so.

So what is the US strategy?

1- Encourage Israel to destroy Hizballah’s fighting capability.
2- Hope that the escalation in fighting will result in a serious and credible threat from Hizballah to Israel that Israel cannot solve on its own.
3- Make sure there are US partners both in Lebanon and Israel that support US presence on the border zone (Siniora and Peres).
4- Sell the idea of multinational troops that are more effective than UNIFIL troops as the only alternative to a continuous war.
5- Ensure that Syria is not alienated, and perhaps engaged, so that it can negotiate Golan with an exhausted, dependent Israel.

Why is the US silent on Lebanese infrastructure destruction?

1- It needs to give Israel space and time (3 weeks seems to be the pre-war agreement) to complete the task–at the risk of being complicit in the war crimes against Lebanon, more blatantly than in Kosovo.
2- It foresees that its presence in Lebanon will bring it the lion’s share of lucrative contracts to rebuild, following the same logic used in Panama,Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
3- It might have been the price Israel demanded for Israel to accept the multinational force. The logic is that since Lebanon is going to become a US ‘affiliate’, in preparation for a peaceful agreement, the economic war is about to begin. ‘Setting back Lebanon 20 years’, the stated goal of the IDF before the attacks, fits the convoluted logic of giving Israel a ‘head start’.
4- Targeting civilian infrastructure brings unity to the Lebanese polity, something that serves the US intention of stabilizing the country in the aftermath, marked by Washington’s insistence that Sinioria’s  democracy is not weakened.
5- Escalating the war and widening the target base increases Hizballah’s response against Israel, prompting its people to call for an end to the war.

The precedents for this approach of using a simmering conflict as a pretext to bring in the troops are several. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Panama’s invasion, and the establishment of bases in Macedonia during the Kosovo crisis are all examples of the US exploiting a local conflict to provide a pretext for the US to intervene militarily. The strategic goal is the securing of the transportation and marketing routes of energy from Saudi Arabia to the European market.

The conflict exploited is the Hizballah-Israel simmering confrontation.

I have talked to my parents yesterday to get an update on the situation in Lebanon. Fortunately, they’re still safe. Resources are still getting lower and lower by the day.

At this point, there is no more gas in the country, and there is at least an hour wait at any gas station to get gas, and that is only to get about $6 worth of gas… do the math … so my dad is going down to work only about twice a week now, and once his tank is empty, they’ll pretty much be staying home. Same goes for electricity, there are some fuel ships awaiting to enter Lebanon to supply fuel for power plants, however, these are not being allowed to go in, so at this rate, in about 1 or 2 weeks, there will be no more electricity, and we’ll go back to the stone age with candles.

Food seems to still be available in moderate quantities, so that’s not to worry about for now. As I speaking with my dad, we are starting to have talks about alternatives of communication (if at all possible) if we actually do loose communication. Obviously, if there is no electricity, E-Mail communication will cease, as well as as probably phone services, especially that Israel is threatening to destroy any communications channels that Huzbollah might be using, which is sometimes the same channels that the rest of the population uses.

This morning, I received a couple of pictures from my sister. no worries, nothing gory this time, but interesting nonetheless. If you’ve been hearing the news, you might have heard of the city of Dahieh, which is mostly muslims, with a lot of Huzbollah in it, the following is a before and after picture of it…
 

The next few pictures are from (what used to be) the Mdairej bridge, which is the highest bridge in the Middle East, or so I think.

The next few are the ”little smile” part of the post my sister’s email comment was that:

This why hizbolllah declared war???

In order to die in the hands of the Israel’ soldiers.

They found heaven on earth

Wow, I’m impressed!

So in the past couple of days i haven’t really posted, since I haven’t really been hearing too much about the situation other than what CNN and all the media says, but that’s stuff that you can read about yourself. Today, and yesterday, I’ve been hearing that the Israelis are starting to reach some of the Christian areas. I’m still not entirely sure about the reason as to why that’s happening, and whether Huzbollah is setting up rocket sites there as mentioned in a previous blog.

A little snippet from my dad’s email today mentioned something about that, so I’ll go ahead and include it here….

[...] As for the war situation today, it is getting into the Christian area where the Israelis bombarded 2 bridges in Jounieh Area, then one in Batroun (Bourj el Fidar) where we had our honeymoon… and Jbeil… on the other hand, the Ouzaai area, and Dahieh, were very heavily bombarded, so today, the streets even in our areas are almost empty. Micha and Pat did not go to work… but I drove down to Beirut as I was promised to get paid by a client… [...]

As you can see, business is so bad, that my dad has to risk driving down to work if he is promised a payment by a client.

Of course, all this in happening on a personal level, then on the media level, i gotta say that I’m sick of hearing about the false promises about wrapping this up. If I remember correctly, yesterday there was a promise in the media that there was going to be a negotiation yesterday that was going to wrap things up, but that same promise has happened 3 times now, so we’ll have to see happens.