Why Change a Losing Formula?
Avedon Carol pointed at this post from Candide’s Notebooks, which posits that the Lebanon war was long in the planning in the US and Israel.The way it was planned, and by whom looks eerily familiar.
Last November, writing in Counterpunch, Trish Schuh cited at length from her interview with Abdelnour: ?Both the Syrian and Lebanese regimes will be changed- whether they like it or not- whether it’s going to be a military coup or something else… and we are working on it,” Abdelnour is quoted as saying. “We know already exactly who’s going to be the replacements. We’re working on it with the Bush administration. This is a Nazi regime of 30 years, killing ministers, presidents and stuff like that. They must be removed. These guys who came to power, who rule by power, can only be removed by power. This is Machiavelli’s power game. That’s how it is. This is how geopolitics — the war games, power games — work. I know inside out how it works, because I come from a family of politicians for the last 60 years. Look, I have access to the top classified information from the CIA from all over the world. They call me, I advise them. I know exactly what’s going on. And this will happen.?
Bragging is in the Lebanese blood. Abdelnour could have simply been blowing alto cumulus fumes out his gibbous moons. But Schuh also cites a Haaretz story from May 2005 that described the Israeli military as having prepared plans to attack Hezbollah back then (pending, of course, the necessary ?incident?). Except that the ?Cedar Revolution? intervened. The feeling among Israelis and Abdelnour-type Lebanese at the time was that the popular movement against Syria would sweep Hezbollah out of there as well. It didn?t. Hezbollah played the Lebanese the way it had played Israel all those years, with sadly effective efficiency. Putting the pieces together, it returned Abdelnour types, and the Israeli plan of 2005, back to the fore.
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It seems Bushco like to stick with the familiar strategies when subverting a sovereign nation and plotting illegal wars. Salon, 2004:
May 4, 2004 When the definitive history of the current Iraq war is finally written, wealthy exile Ahmed Chalabi will be among those judged most responsible for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. More than a decade ago Chalabi teamed up with American neoconservatives to sell the war as the cornerstone of an energetic new policy to bring democracy to the Middle East — and after 9/11, as the crucial antidote to global terrorism. It was Chalabi who provided crucial intelligence on Iraqi weaponry to justify the invasion, almost all of which turned out to be false, and laid out a rosy scenario about the country’s readiness for an American strike against Saddam that led the nation’s leaders to predict — and apparently even believe — that they would be greeted as liberators. Chalabi also promised his neoconservative patrons that as leader of Iraq he would make peace with Israel, an issue of vital importance to them. A year ago, Chalabi was riding high, after Saddam Hussein fell with even less trouble than expected.
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Spooky.
