RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Hezbollah Declares 'Open War' vs Israel

Hezbollah's leader declared Friday that his group is ready for "open war" with Israel, and the guerrilla group attacked an Israeli warship positioned off Beirut's coast as his words were being broadcast.

In an audiotape aired on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television less than an hour after his Beirut home and offices were destroyed in Israeli airstrikes, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah addressed himself to Israelis, saying "You wanted an open war and we are ready for an open war."

Soon after the broadcast, Israeli Defense Forces reported a naval vessel was lightly damaged by rocket fire.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to continue the offensive until the guerrilla group was neutralized.

The death toll in three days of fighting rose to 73 killed in Lebanon — almost all civilians, including five who died in strikes in south Beirut and the south Friday — and 12 in Israel, including four civilians killed by Hezbollah rockets. The violence sent shock waves through a region already traumatized by the ongoing battles in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas.


Olmert told U.N. chief Kofi Annan in a phone call that the offensive would not halt until Hezbollah guerillas are disarmed. But he agreed to allow U.N. mediation for a cease-fire — but only if the terms for the truce included the return of the soldiers and the disarming of the guerrillas, an official close to the premier said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

At the same time, Israel sought to exact a price from the Lebanese government for allowing Hezbollah to operate freely in the south. Its strikes on the airport and roads and naval blockade all but cut off Lebanon from the world as it gradually increased the punishment to infrastructure.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Israel against expanding its campaign to attack Syria and said the Jewish state couldn't harm Iran.

Iran is a top ally of Syria and both countries back Hezbollah — leading to speculation by some that they were fueling the crisis. Israeli has warned Hezbollah might try to move its two Israeli prisoners to Iran.

Israeli officials said the air campaign against Lebanon was the biggest since the Israeli invasion in 1982. The only comparable military action since then was the "Grapes of Wrath" offensive in 1996, also sparked by Hezbollah attacks.

But the Lebanese casualties were mounting faster than in 1996, when at least 165 people were killed in 17 days of fighting, including more than 100 civilians who died in Israeli shelling of a U.N. base.

Israeli warplanes hit central Beirut for the first time and smashed the Hezbollah leadership's main strongholds on Saturday as strikes killed at least 33 Lebanese, including civilians fleeing the onslaught. Hezbollah guerrilla rockets continued to pour into Israel, where officials warned citizens that Tel Aviv could be attacked.

The deadly barrages came as Israel charged that Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have 100 troops in Lebanon providing Hezbollah key support — including helping fire a missile Friday that badly damaged an Israeli warship. Hezbollah denied it. (Full story)

Neither side showed signs of backing down from the conflict, which erupted Wednesday when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. As civilian deaths mounted, diplomatic efforts to end the crisis had yet to get off the ground.

In an emotional televised speech, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora called on the United Nations to broker an immediate cease-fire to end Israel's land, sea and air offensive against Lebanon.

He also pledged to reassert government authority all over Lebanese territory — suggesting the possibility of deploying the Lebanese army in the south, which Hezbollah effectively controls. That would meet a repeated U.N. and U.S. demand.

Israeli troops clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas on the Lebanese side of the border Wednesday, while warplanes flattened 20 buildings and killed at least 20 people as fighting entered its second week with the U.S. signaling it will not push Israel toward a fast cease-fire.

Hundreds of Americans boarded a luxury ship at Beirut's port that was to carry them from the country, with many complaining about the slow pace of the U.S. evacuation effort. Europeans and Lebanese with foreign passports already have fled by the thousands. Two Chinook transport helicopters also took 120 Americans to Larnaca in Cyprus and were to do at least one more trip later Wednesday.

Military officials said Israeli troops crossed the border in search of tunnels and weapons.

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(07-19) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The Bush administration's notion that toppling Saddam Hussein would stabilize a turbulent region is among the casualties of this week's Middle East carnage.

The death toll in Lebanon and Israel, which exceeds 250 in the past week, is a grim reminder that the sectarian violence in Baghdad 500 miles to the east is but one of many hotspots in a region that has been plagued by violence for more than 1,000 years.

The oft-stated hope that a new Iraqi government would swiftly transform the region's fractured politics has been realized with unintended consequences: an emboldened Iran; the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections; and Syria's departure from Lebanon. The familiar strain has been hatred between the Arabs and Israelis and a widely held assumption that the situation will grow worse before it improves.

"Unless and until you solve the Arab-Israel conflict, you are going to have instability in the region,'' said Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Some scholars view the situation from the opposite direction. Coit Blacker, director of Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, believes that "there is no answer to the Arab-Israel conflict until the nature of politics within the region changes substantially.''

Yet there is wide agreement that more than three years after attacking Iraq, the administration's mission to build a democracy that would foster stability -- the most often cited reason to go to war after ridding Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction -- is a long way from being accomplished.

"Partly as a result of what's happening in Iraq, the whole region seems to be separating along sectarian lines,'' said Michael Sterner, former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and an assistant secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter.

"I haven't seen every clash as being something that portends doom, but it's a trend that is rather dangerous in my opinion. It could really spell trouble,'' Sterner said.

The path from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to this week's clash between Israel and Hezbollah is a matter of conjecture. However, most analysts agree that Syria and Iran are behind Hezbollah's actions, and have been stirred, in part, by the 2003 attack.

"It's an inescapable fact, as uncomfortable as it is, that the ... Iranian position is stronger than it otherwise would be,'' Blacker said. "It's not an accident that on the more traditional Middle East front, things are heating up again. The Iranians are trying to send a concrete signal.''

The overthrow of Iran's Sunni enemies in Iraq has "created an Iranian moment,'' Cook said

The Syrians, who are largely Sunnis, withdrew from Lebanon last year, a move which was widely hailed as a positive consequence of Hussein's demise. Yet they left behind a government in Lebanon, though democratically elected, apparently too weak to control the violent Hezbollah forces who have been firing missiles at the Israelis and killing scores of its citizens.

This was not the sort of geopolitical shakeup predicted by President Bush when he declared two weeks before the Iraq invasion that "acting against the danger will also contribute greatly to the long-term safety and stability of our world.''

Although such stability in the future is not out of the question, it is clear that the Bush administration expected results far more quickly.

Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, an administration confidant who was among the strongest proponents of the notion that overthrowing Hussein would stabilize the region, insisted at the time the war began that the fruits of Iraq's liberation would come quickly.

"We want to bring real stability to the region,'' Perle said in a 2003 debate sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine. "We will hand over power quickly -- not in years, maybe not even in months -- to give Iraqis a chance to shape their own destiny. The world will see this.''

Perle said the chances for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "will improve as soon as Saddam is gone,'' and asserted that afterward "we will have a very good opportunity ... to persuade Syria to stop sponsoring terrorism.

"I promise we will be more effective in that if we remove Hussein,'' Perle said, exhibiting the confidence shared by many in the administration.

Three years later, it is the attack on Iraq that many critics cite as the reason that Bush is unable to engage Syria. Rather than directly taking to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wishes U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan would apply such pressure. It was in the same conversation, which unbeknownst to Bush and Blair was being captured by an open microphone, that Bush said: "The thing is, what they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s -- and it's over.''

It is uncertain that any amount of diplomacy could have stopped the recent violence. Previous presidents have invested far more time and effort in Middle East negotiations, without lasting results. Yet Bush must now battle the perception, certainly throughout the Arab world, that he has embarked on a policy of failure.

According to Hisham Milhem, Washington correspondent for the Lebanese paper Al-Nahar, there is a sense that "America's moment in the Middle East has come to an end, or to be specific, George Bush's moment in the Middle East is over ... and that the Americans are drowning in Iraq's quicksand, that the American project, the drive to spread democracy in the Middle East, has reached a dead end.''

In the weeks before the war began, Bush said that "old patterns of conflict in the Middle East can be broken. ... America will seize every opportunity in pursuit of peace. And the end of the present regime in Iraq would create such an opportunity.''

Yet the consequences have not been what Bush envisioned.

"Even if you defeat one group, what happens if you create an environment where others will take its place, whether it is in Lebanon or in Syria?'' asked Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.

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King Snarf said:
Well, Iran's been getting uppity. In the past, they had their old enemy Iraq to keep them in check. But wait... Who destabilized Iraq? It's quickly becoming a clusterfuck over there, and U.S. military involvement doesn't seem to be making it better.

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King Snarf said:
Well, Iran's been getting uppity. In the past, they had their old enemy Iraq to keep them in check.

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King Snarf said:
It's fun to debate, and to demean Pariah, but I think the best thing we can do right now is do what I have been doing recently- offer a simple prayer to your deity of choice that a peaceful resolution will soon be found.

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U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.

Hezbollah guerillas should have been targeted with other terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Taliban, which operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kerry said. However, Bush, has focused military strength on Iraq.

"This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah," he said.

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the G-man said:

The Detroit News

The problem with statements like this is that some people believe them. And they just aren't true.

No President can prevent two other countries from going to war if they are sufficiently "pissed" against each other.

Furthermore, if you read the article, basically, Kerry is saying we shouldn't have attacked Iraq...and should have attacked...Lebanon and Pakistan?

What a joke. Does Kerry really think he could have gotten support from his Euro-weenie allies for that?

Of course not, but rather than offer real solutions, Kerry is playing the "blame Bush" game.

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Wonder Boy said:
That is what pisses me off about the Democrats.

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They (including Sen. Kerry) vote in Sept 2002 to support an Iraq invasion. When it turns out not to be easy, they (including Kerry) condemn the Iraq invasion and say they wouldn't vote for Iraq invasion, if they had it to do again.

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But Kerry says, if he was President now, he would have invaded Lebanon ?!?
A country that has not posed any threat to the U.S. ?
That's far less a threat to the U.S. than Iraq was ?

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And yet these same Democrats, who vilify Bush for invading Iraq, who say that without WMD's found, we had no other legitimate reason to invade (the same Democrats who voted to support an invasion in the first place) ?

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Kerry is so busy changing and pandering his rhetoric daily, to whatever he thinks the public wants to hear, that he doesn't seem to realize he's proposed exactly the action he criticized Bush for taking in Iraq.
Forever rendering himself an unelectable schmuck.

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Wonder Boy said:
That is what pisses me off about the Democrats.

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r3x29yz4a said:and your post is what pisses me off about republicans. very narrow minded. you see everything as black and white and filter out whatever you don't want to hear.

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WB
They (including Sen. Kerry) vote in Sept 2002 to support an Iraq invasion. When it turns out not to be easy, they (including Kerry) condemn the Iraq invasion and say they wouldn't vote for Iraq invasion, if they had it to do again.

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RAY
they voted on the "slam dunk" intel and the stirring speeches by bush and his people about saddam's iminent threat to us.

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RAY:
by "not easy" do you mean the failure to find the promised wmds?

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RAY:
or the fact that the handling of the occupation was so mismanaged

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WB
But Kerry says, if he was President now, he would have invaded Lebanon ?!?
A country that has not posed any threat to the U.S. ?
That's far less a threat to the U.S. than Iraq was ?

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RAY
they're at least an active threat to the region.

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WB
And yet these same Democrats, who vilify Bush for invading Iraq, who say that without WMD's found, we had no other legitimate reason to invade (the same Democrats who voted to support an invasion in the first place) ?

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RAY
if i tell you that a guy down the street has a machine gun and he wants to shoot you then ask permission to go in and beat the crap out of him, and you say okay, then i do so only that gun turned out to be a rusty butter knife can i still claim that you gave me the ok to do it? can i be mad for you to change your opinion once you see the new,honest facts?

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WB
Kerry is so busy changing and pandering his rhetoric daily, to whatever he thinks the public wants to hear, that he doesn't seem to realize he's proposed exactly the action he criticized Bush for taking in Iraq.
Forever rendering himself an unelectable schmuck.

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RAY
this point is idiotic, every politician on both sides say what the public wants to hear or tries to please their base supporters.

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the G-man said:

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RAY
they voted on the "slam dunk" intel and the stirring speeches by bush and his people about saddam's iminent threat to us.

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We've gone over this many, many times. The "slam dunk intel" preceeded the Bush administration. Prior to Bush taking office, the democratic leadership, including Clinton, Gore and Kerry all made similar stirring speeches about Saddam's imminent threat.


The fact you can't acknowledge this would almost seem to be, oh, I dunno, seeing things in black and white and filtering out what you don't want to hear.

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RAY
they're at least an active threat to the region.

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So was Saddam. He was actively financing Hamas, other terrorist groups and suicide bombers throughout the region.

This has been documented on other threads. The only real controversy is how tied his country was to 9-11.
However even if he, personally, had no direct link to the 9-11 attack, you are wholly wrong to ignore the ties he had to mideast terrorism which, as noted above, have been documented here and elsewhere.

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King Snarf said:
Now, whether or not that the statements made that claim the tower radioed the strike repeatedly before being hit is true or not, at the very least, this shows some serious negligence and or incompetence on the part of the Israel military forces.

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You should get out more. The IAF is possibly the best-trained air force in the world, not to mention one of the most combat-experienced. The only things that keep them from being THE BEST air force in the world are the small size of Israel (not to mention its comparatively small defense budget) and their lack of low-observable technology and the advantage it provides. Perhaps instead of blaming incompetence, you should look at the likelihood that it might have been poor intelligence sharing, or possibly the 'hugging' technique Doc mentioned. In other words, next time maybe do a little research.

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Beardguy57 said:
I hope in a few hundred years, the Webster's Dictionary of those times will define "War" as something people USED to do in more primitive times.

War is just getting so fucking old, you know?

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Chant said:
But I guess the Rules Of Engagement are the first thing to go down the drain when there's a war on

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Captain Sammitch said:

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Beardguy57 said:
I hope in a few hundred years, the Webster's Dictionary of those times will define "War" as something people USED to do in more primitive times.

War is just getting so fucking old, you know?

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It's as old as human civilization, and no matter how idealistic you want to be, it will continue until the end of human civilization as we know it.

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Yeah, but a guy can dream.... although I fear that, someday, War will ultimately destroy all life on Earth..and that would be both very sad and very stupid.

From the way things are today, that day does not seem far off...

The more advanced our weapons become, the closer we move towards Armegeddon.

This War between Isreal and Lebanon seems like another brick in the wall towards that....

And I don't think GOD put us all here to do that.....

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thedoctor said:

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Chant said:
But I guess the Rules Of Engagement are the first thing to go down the drain when there's a war on

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My question to you is, how do you follow the Rules of Engagement when your enemy doesn't. Hezbollah has no qualms about disguiseing military in civilian on medical convoys. Hezbollah has no problem with sticking and launching rockets in/from schools and hospitals. Israel has done all they can to keep civilian casualties down by going so far as to tell villages that civilians need to evacuate within the next few days. How many times has Hezbollah told Israelie citizens to leave an area before dropping rockets in civilian populated areas?

War is terrible, and I wish it wouldn't happen. But I'm not going to be as blind as many in the UN about the fact that the Iranian influenced Hezbollah attacked and kidnapped Israelie soldiers, are purposefully targetting civilians with rocket attacks, and are endangering Lebanon civilians by operating right in the midst of residential areas. Where's the public outcry from the UN on Hezbollah's tactics? I think Israel's attack on the Palestinian Minister of Health (I think it was that one) who wasn't even a memeber of Hamas was out of line, but I'm not going to blame them when the world essentially turns their back on Israel and condemns them while letting their enemies bomb the hell out of them without so much as a word.

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the G-man said:
Sammitch, you are forgetting the main thing here:

Israel is composed primarily of Jews. Jews are considered "whites".

Lebanon is composed primarily of Muslims. Muslims, regardless of skin color, are considered "persecuted minorities."

The first, and foremost, rule of left wing political correctness is that any action taken by a "white" against a "persecuted minority" is wrong, regardless of whatever provaction the "persecuted minority" engaged in to start the matter.

Try to remember that and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble debating this issue.

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