[Marxism] Goldhagen -- Bush and Olmert's eager executioner -- calls for war on Syria and Iran

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Israel's Way Out
Hezbollah and Hamas attacks have backed it into a corner. Escalation
against Iran and Syria might be the best hope.
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
August 8, 2006

FOR THE SECOND TIME in the long history of the Middle East conflict, an
enemy of Israel has effectively said: We do not care what you do.

Hezbollah - in choosing not to return the two soldiers it seized on July
12, and in its bombardment of Israel - has declared that it does not
care if its war-making leads Israel to attack Lebanon's cities, ruin
that country's economy and kill its people. What matters most is
inflicting damage on Israel, weakening its morale and goading it to a
level of destruction that will incite the world's wrath. The
Palestinians said as much with their second intifada and their suicide
bombings. But this is different because Hezbollah's daily rainfall of
rockets in Israel portends an intolerable military assault without end.

ADVERTISEMENT
What can Israel do - what could any country do? - with such an enemy?
Except for a desperate Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War, other
countries and armies that would have liked to destroy Israel did not
target Israeli cities because they knew that Israel would intensely bomb
Cairo, Amman or Damascus. Israel had deterrence. Had an enemy dared such
an attack, Israel could have compelled it to stop by inflicting massive
damage. With Hezbollah - and with Hamas as well - Israel's ability to
deter attacks or to compel them to stop has been lost.

The third strategic means of dealing with an enemy - making a genuine
peace - has not been possible because Hezbollah and Hamas are expressly
committed to Israel's destruction. They see any cessation of hostilities
as an interlude before further attack.

So Israel has adopted the fourth strategic possibility: to devastate its
dangerous foe, which also would restore deterrence. Yet Israel has
discovered that against combatants who look like civilians and whose
rockets are hidden everywhere, it must fight longer and occupy and
destroy much more of Lebanon than it may deem moral, wise or feasible.
Even a future international force in southern Lebanon - the possibility
of which is highly uncertain - may be incapable of thwarting Hezbollah
and would still leave northern Israel in Hezbollah's rocket range.

What strategies remain? No. 5 is intolerable: living with ongoing, and
probably increasing, rocket attacks into northern Israel and beyond.
Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promises that "there are
many cities in the center [of Israel] which will be targeted in the
phase of 'beyond Haifa.' "

The sixth option is to compel Hezbollah's suppliers and patrons - Syria
and Iran - to end the terror. Neither country wishes a war with
militarily superior Israel (Syria's saber rattling notwithstanding). If
every Hezbollah missile into Israel produced Israeli retaliation against
Syria, and possibly Iran (including its nuclear production sites), Syria
and Iran would be forced to make Hezbollah stop. Obviously, this is a
last-ditch option. It would escalate the conflict and increase
international pressure on Israel to desist.

All of Israel's strategic choices are bad or ineffective or undesirable.
And yet this last option would be the most likely to reestablish the
deterrence critical to Israel's long-term survival - and to peace in the
region - by demonstrating Israel's enduring power to compel an end of
attacks. And it might prevent still more massive devastation of Lebanon.

Make no mistake: Israel is fighting for its life. It faces a
historically new kind of fanatical foe, political Islam, which combines
three characteristics: a political-religious ideology calling for its
enemies' annihilation; indifference to, even the celebration of, its own
people's death (because martyrs are rewarded with a place in heaven);
and virtually unstoppable technology (missiles) and techniques (suicide
bombing) of terror.

The political Islamists are emboldened by their newfound power. As
Nasrallah has boasted, "When were 2 million Israelis forced to become
displaced, or to stay in bomb shelters for more than 18 days?" And the
danger will escalate a thousandfold if Iran, the epicenter of political
Islam and Hezbollah's master, achieves its own invulnerability with
nuclear weapons, so that it too can launch rocket and other attacks
against its many targets. Iran's former president and current power
broker, Hashemi Rafsanjani, spoke candidly in 2001: "The use of even one
nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything," he said, although
it would harm the Islamic world. "It is not irrational," he went on, "to
contemplate such an eventuality."

A nuclear Iran, sharing Hezbollah's and Hamas' enmity for Israel's very
existence, is a foe with a million times the wealth and destructive
might to found, fund and supply many more Hezbollahs against many more
enemies, including the hated West.

Israel's political Islamic enemies are studying and rejoicing over the
new geostrategic situation. These totalitarians' ultimate targets - all
"infidels," especially here and in Europe - should study it as well, be
sobered and realize that Israel, in fighting this war in its
self-defense, to reestablish a geostrategic balance, and for its
long-term survival, is ultimately fighting for them as well.


DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN, a member of Harvard University's Center for
European Studies and the author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," is completing a book on genocide.
His website is www.goldhagen.com.
Sy


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism