Wherein I Prove I've Been Reading a Damn Lot About WW3 (or 4) (or how about NOT WW3?)

Anyone that doesn't think the Israeli-Lebanese conflict is a proxy war, listen up:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, U.S. officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign.

Maybe the word "reality" should be substituted for appearance.

There's no question that the outbreak of hostilities, followed by the usual "honest broker" in the region, the US, playing Willy Wonka by halfheartedly whispering "No, please, stop" while simultaneously egging Israel on (and, we now learn, arming them), are seen by many as a great opportunity. Like ">this guy:

And indeed, this is a great opportunity.

Kind of sums it up, doesn't it?

The story goes that the only reason Iraq hasn't turned into Flowers-and-Sweets-Land is because we didn't nuke the whole country when we had the chance, basically. Insufficient force is always blamed. The pacifists on the left and in the media, those all-powerful pacifists with the ear of this President on virtually all matters of state, have stabbed us in the back again. (By the way, go and read the "Stabbed in the Back" Harper's article I just linked to. Go. Do it.)

(Done?)

(Good.)

Now this conflict, sparked by Hezbollah, whose younger firebrands are no longer constrained by Syrian influence (this is an excellent backgrounder), is seen as a pretext to make things right, to get rid of Syria and Iran once and for all, and to make the Middle East safe for democracy. And empty of people, one would suspect, making it even more safe. Now this would be "drunken lout at the end of the bar" stuff if it weren't for the fact that the most powerful man in the world believes it too:

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.

"He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians," said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. "The tacticians would say: 'Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.' The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.' "

This is the entire doctrine of preventive war. It basically says, "We're going to have to kill them in a couple years, let's just kill them now and get it over with." And it's been proven completely bereft of logic in Iraq, where even some of its most ardent supporters won't don the rose-colored glasses anymore. Iraq did not only blow up in our faces and bring bloody chaos to that country, it degraded our ability to manage crises in the region, and to respond with force. We can sic our Israeli attack dogs on everyone, but that's about it. And in the meantime, Iran has become an emboldened regional power, the Saudis and the Egyptians are nervous as hell, Israel is demonstrably less safe, the rest of the world's crises are neglected as we dig our heels in deeper, and so on and so forth.

The neocon answer to that is "Just wait." This is nothing more than a filibuster tactic, one that says "I'm playing a longer game than you, so shut up with your bickering and watch this payload drop on that hospital." It's an attempt to bully and confuse and distract while they rev up for World War III. And it's very clear that the Republicans will be campaigning on the issue of al-out war in November, a kind of "keep us in power so we can keep you safe by making sure nobody is safe." I mean, giving bombs to Israel at this juncture and for this purpose does nothing but make everyone in this country a legitimate military target.

(I'm butting in again. Great short op-ed on the lunacy of "just wait" is here.)

(Thanks, back to your blog.)

Preventive war, actually, has a long history. The outbreak of WWI with a small assassination of an archduke in Serbia had immediate resonance for me when I heard the news in Lebanon. Turns out it was closer than I thought:

The current dynamic, in essence, is that various elements -- mostly in the United States and in Israel, but also elsewhere throughout the West -- see Hezbollah's cross-border raid as providing a useful pretext for launching a preventative war against what's seen as rising Iranian and Hezbollah power [...]

In 1914, Germany viewed war with Russia as inevitable and thought it was better to fight sooner rather than later and therefore sought opportunities to get into war. Similarly, when it took office, the Bush administration was convinced that war with Iraq was inevitable and began casting about for opportunities to fight one. As of a month ago, Bush and Israeli leaders were convinced that despite the Cedar Revolution and six years of waning Israel-Hezbollah tensions that war was inevitable, and now they’ve found an opportunity to fight it. Significant elements of American opinion likewise see a clash with Iran as inevitable and have been persistently trying for the past several years to find a saleable pretext for starting one, and many see the current crisis as promising in that regard. As Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman point out in their new book Ethical Realism, this embrace of preventative war has a long legacy on the American right dating back at least to James Burnham and it's invariably been disastrous -- just as it was for Wilhelmine Germany.

Disastrous? Nah, it just resulted in Germany losing two world wars and their national pride. Small price to pay in the CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS(tm)!

In fact, the neocons will deny the very existence OF a Cedar Revolution, saying it failed, and bombing Lebanon is no different than bombing Syria and that's that, conveniently forgetting how they used the Lebanese situation last year to push forward the idea of an "Arab Spring" that justified all the concerns about Iraq. See, it really did flower freedom and democracy in the region. Except when it didn't. But that's only because WE HAVEN'T BOMBED THEM HARD ENOUGH!

I don't really think this is now fixable in my lifetime. This Administration, with its bullyboy ways and ignorance of regional realities, has so damaged our standing in the world that we'll never find peace. And of course, that's probably the point. With chaos comes a power vaccuum, in which they can very skillfully place themselves. 500,000 people left Beirut in the last two weeks, and more than that have left Iraq. If they didn't curse the US and Israel before, they certainly would be open to it now. Terrorism is not a finite resource, it comes from anger and frustration and a lack of opportunity and a perceived helplessness. Fundamentalists who have perverted the Koran jump on these populations and show them an enemy. It's a maneuver as old as time itself. It's happening right here in this country (haven't you read Stabbed in the Back yet? Go get that done!).

There are some conservatives with consciences who understand the monster they've created and nurtured, and are desperately looking for a way out. For example, Gregory Djerejian hands Hugh Hewitt his ass on a platter:

We're bogged down in Iraq, where a low-grade civil war could get much worse in a hurry, and where we've lost almost 3,000 men, and, more generally, Bush's ill-fated messianic, neo-Wilsonian naiveties (presto, elections!) have not worked in Palestine, have not worked in Iraq--nor are moderating impulses afoot in Egypt, or Lebanon, or Iran, or Syria. All Hugh is offering, really, is faith-based adventurism, really just a bogus, non-strategy. But it's all charming, to a fashion. Over a beer or two with David Rieff yesterday, we mentioned Hugh, and David in reference to him quoted one of Sigmund Freud's teachers Charcot, who once quipped about: "the beautiful calm of the hysteric". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Hugh Hewitt, so evocative of "the beautiful calm of the hysteric". Must be fun, this blissful reverie, eh Hugh?

And to the extent that more people peek behind the Neocon Curtain and see the wizened, feckless old men hiding inside, it's a good thing (although perhaps one that's tragically too late). But I can't help but agree with Billmon, who writes that the enablers of these madmen offer the world nothing with their "come to Jesus" moments:

It speaks volumes about what a clueless, naive chump you were. And because neither you nor your then-beloved Administration actually had the slightest clue just how "fraught with peril" the road ahead was, we now have to listen to your panic-striken pleas for somebody to do something about the chaos enveloping Democracy Boy's pet project:

"This is where America must make its strongest stand in the neighborhood: namely to turn around the increasingly abysmal disaster that has become the US intervention in Iraq."

Well, it's a little late for that, Greg my boy. Failure isn't just an option, it's now the only option. Of course, if you and your fellow war hawks had listened to anyone who knew anything about the tortured history of Iraq, the Shi'a, the Middle East -- or the human species -- maybe you would have understood the risks from the beginning. But I doubt it.

I suppose I should welcome these refugees to reality, and let them be useful idiots for the Left Opposition for a change. But they don't actually bring much to the table -- just lots of wishful thinking and a water-down Wilsonian idealism that bears absolutely no relationship to the modern Middle East -- or the old one, for that matter. And so far that kind of misplaced idealism has only helped the neocons (who generally know better) get a lot of people killed.

What we are dealing with here, in other words, are some truly useless idiots. And this country -- and this world -- have far too many of those already.

And I fear that the idiots, both useless and useful, will continue this downward spiral that offers no hope for success but a virtual certainty of anguish, suffering, and mass death.

"1, 2, 3, 4, we don't want your stinking war." -anonymous, 1967