The Deplorable Lacking Performance of Koffi Annan

“While Hezbollah’s actions are deplorable and Israel has a right to defend itself, the excessive use of force is to be condemned,” said today the Secretary General of the UN. But to call the actions of Hezbollah "deplorable" while actually condemning Israel's right to defend itself betrays not only how little Mr. Annan knows about the amount of force Israel is capable of using if it needs to but also his naive hopes or his sympathies and the lack of neutrality expected from his position. While the media largely ignores the Oil for Food corruption scandal of his administration there are also other factors largely ignored by the media which have changed the context of the "Israeli-Palestinian” conflict.

We need to remember that among the papers captured during the raid that killed al-Zarqawi there was an analysis acknowledging their loosing battle for "hearts and minds" in Iraq; not only having an impossible time recruiting Iraqis but international fighters as well. It also stated the need to create an international crisis to divert American attention from Iraq and create a situation that would create victim sympathies for Muslims in order to increase international recruitment for Iraq.

So far part of this strategy seems to be working if you take a look at the creation of victims in the American and European media in whose mind Hezbollah and their support structure in Lebanon are the innocent victim; never mind that except for Iran and Syria most Middle East governments, the Arab League and the G8 have condemned and blamed Hezbollah for the current situation.

Israel should call their bluff and not exercise restraint but hit harder even at the risk of playing into the hands of creating recruiting sympathies for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The more they get to recruit the more will be killed. When the US counter-attacked Germany and Japan it help generate more SS recruits and more Kamikaze recruits. The more they recruited the more they died and the less they had, ergo, we won. The only restraint Israel needs to exercise is the restraint of the wise: hit hard enough to destroy Hezbollah and hit soft enough not to give them a propaganda victory. But in the end it should defeat, not appease an enemy that has sworn its destruction.

We should work for peace, we all want peace. But the international Islamic Fundamentalist movement doesn't want peace. They want submission, that is, our submission. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad have clearly demonstrated once and for all that they are no longer just a local Palestinian patriotic movement but active assets and part of the worldwide Islamic Fundamentalist movement the capital of which is Iran. It is becoming more and more obvious that the Bush administration position is correct in terms of strategy and tactics and geopolitical analysis. A democratic and pluralistic Iraq is a wedge, a break in the Fundamentalist Islamic bridge that this movement wants to build all the way from Iran through Syria to Morocco. That bridge would be a real threat to the West by controlling oil as a weapon and by becoming allied with China, no friend of Islam but a latent enemy of Islam's enemy. This is the context that has changed.

Regardless of the sophomoric and "strawman" argument of the fanatic Bush-hating camp mantra "ad absurdum" that the US was wrong in attacking Iraq when Iraq did not attack the US, a similar position was faced by the FDR administration when it had to decide to go strategically after Germany first, which did not attack the US, instead of Japan which did. Germany was not only a friend of the enemy that did attack the US, but Germany was also an economic and industrial power house which not only threatened the total take over of Europe including England but also, and perhaps more importantly, the Caucasus and the Middle East (ME). Germany was to the battle against Fascism in the European Theater situation what Iran is to the ME Theater in the war against Islamic Fascism, and England was to the European region what Israel is now to the ME.

If Israel and Europe fall to the Islamic Jihadist-Fascist movement they will have total control of the ME, and after that they will be able to dictate to the rest of the Muslim world in the Pacific Rim, etc. The US should play their own game of divide and conquer based on their own dictum, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". This is the time for the US to strengthen military and political alliances with moderate Muslim sectors in the Middle East and to emphasize on them the importance of democratic reforms while at the same time doing everything they can to eliminate the material and social sources for the recruitment of terrorists.

The obvious silence and lack of unity in condemning Israel coming from the rest of the ME is indicative of the fear some countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have of a Fundamentalist takeover of the ME by Iran. The US should exploit this reality. The new wars by proxy, Iran using militias and China using Muslim countries while standing by is just like Russia did during WWII and the Cold War. The only way the US won the “battles by proxy” of the Cold War was by urging and supporting democratic change around the world. Ironically, the only place the US failed, Vietnam, turned out to be a failure that served as encouragement for the USSR to continue attempting a war by proxy in Latin America and Africa.

Only in the minds of the BBC and the "Vietnamized" American generation of journalists and politicians there is another road to take. For them the worldwide Islamic Jihadist-Fascist movement doesn't really exist, 9/11 was an exception and the only thing that needs to be done is to retreat from Iraq just like from Vietnam and Sudan, which will please and appease the Jihadist-Fascists. But this is a movement that uses its own civilians as martyrs with a guarantee of heaven as price for their lives which then they can use for propaganda.

As said elsewhere, does anybody think that the international Islamic Fundamentalist movement is about the rights of workers, gay rights, women's rights, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, academic freedom, freedom of religion? As critical as we have been of Israel-US relations and of Israeli policies, one needs to ask, who in the Middle East better represents those values, Israel or the Islamic Fundamentalists?

The moral responsibility for civilian deaths in Lebanon lies on the enemies of Israel when they use civilian locations such as apartment buildings to hide their human and military assets. Japan did the same placing a home based war industry in civilian neighborhoods and thus their civilian population paid the price of becoming military targets. The US and Israel are in the forefront of this worldwide battle against Islamic Jihadist-Fascism. The rest of the world, Europe, the UN and the narrow-minded and blind adolescent partisan haters in the US are still sleeping. Mr. Annan, that is the deplorable situation.