Lebanon

I cannot make any sense of what is happening in Lebanon. There seems to be no rational Capitalist motive for Israel's war of aggression. The agreed nexus appears to be Iran.

Billmon at the Whiskey Bar opines about The War Party

Of course, it might not actually come to this -- or if it did it might not come quickly. But the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it's closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America's occupation of Iraq and Israel's intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.

It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon -- perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel's failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

Prof. Juan Cole comtemplates the One Ring to Rule Them

It may be that that hawks are thinking this way: Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

Meanwhile on the lunatic left, James Howard Kunstler shudders under the bombardment of Guns of August as the onrushing Jihad thunders closer and closer:

America has been reduced in the current affair to something only a little better than a nervous bystander. America's growing exhaustion and its inability to control events is on display for all to see. So is the foolish intransigence of our easy-motoring, suburban sprawl-building economy, which has made us psychologically the vassals of the Islamic oil-exporting nations. We're doing nothing to prepare for the day when all that oil stops coming through the Strait of Hormuz. Most of the American public not only has no idea what trouble we're in, but they're strangely proud of their cluelessness -- as they kick back and wait for "the market" to "come up with something."

But if the guns of August 2006 really do set something bigger off, and the oil fields go up in flames, or the shipping lanes get shut down, or if any number of other things that can go wrong do go wrong, America will have a whole lot more to think about than Nascar and Jennifer Anniston's love life.

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