The Middle East Continues...

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Flip McWho
Isn't ****ing with Iran's oil exports bad for the rest of the world as well though?

Yes, but worst for Iran. It would likely cause a worldwide recession, as well as a be significant impetus to move away from oil as an energy source. But it beats the hell out of exchanging nukes.

[Sikander]

An interesting take from DEBKA (whose reliability I can make no claim for):

http://debka.com/article.php?aid=1201

Tehran Takes Gloomy View of the Lebanon War and Truce

August 14, 2006, 3:35 PM (GMT+02:00)

While the damage caused Israel’s military reputation tops Western assessments of the Lebanon war, DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report an entirely different perception taking hold in ruling circles in Tehran.

After UN Security Council resolution 1701 calling for a truce was carried Friday, Aug. 11, the heads of the regime received two separate evaluations of the situation in Lebanon – one from Iran’s foreign ministry and one from its supreme national security council. Both were bleak: their compilers were concerned that Iran had been manipulatively robbed of its primary deterrent asset ahead of a probable nuclear confrontation with the United States and Israel.

While the foreign ministry report highlighted the negative aspects of the UN resolution, the council’s document complained that Hizballah squandered thousands of rockets – either by firing them into Israel or having them destroyed by the Israeli air force.

The writer of this report is furious over the waste of Iran’s most important military investment in Lebanon merely for the sake of a conflict with Israeli over two kidnapped soldiers.

It took Iran two decades to build up Hizballah’s rocket inventory.

DEBKAfile’s sources estimate that Hizballah’s adventure wiped out most of the vast sum of $4-6 bn the Iranian treasury sunk into building its military strength. The organization was meant to be strong and effective enough to provide Iran with a formidable deterrent to Israel embarking on a military operation to destroy the Islamic regime’s nuclear infrastructure.

To this end, Tehran bought the Israeli military doctrine of preferring to fight its wars on enemy soil. In the mid-1980s, Iran decided to act on this doctrine by coupling its nuclear development program with Israel’s encirclement and the weakening its deterrence strength. The Jewish state was identified at the time as the only country likely to take vigorous action to spike Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

The ayatollahs accordingly promoted Hizballah’s rise as a socio-political force in Lebanon, at the same time building up its military might and capabilities for inflicting damage of strategic dimensions to Israel’s infrastructure.

That effort was accelerated after Israeli forces withdrew from the Lebanese security zone in May 2000. A bunker network and chain of fortified positions were constructed, containing war rooms equipped with the finest western hi-tech gadgetry, including night vision gear, computers and electronics, as well as protective devices against bacteriological and chemical warfare.

This fortified network was designed for assault and defense alike.

Short- medium- and long-range rockets gave the hard edge to Hizballah’s ablity to conduct a destructive war against Israel and its civilians – when the time was right for Tehran.

Therefore, Iran’s rulers are hopping mad and deeply anxious over news of the huge damage sustained by Hizballah’s rocket inventory, which was proudly touted before the war as numbering 13,000 pieces.

Hizballah fighters, they are informed, managed to fire only a small number of Khaibar-1 rockets, most of which hit Haifa and Afula, while nearly 100 were destroyed or disabled by Israeli air strikes.

The long-range Zelzal-1 and Zelzal-2, designed for hitting Tel Aviv and the nuclear reactor at Dimona have been degraded even more. Iran sent over to Lebanon 50 of those missiles. The keys to the Zelzal stores stayed in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers who were in command of Hizballah. Nasrallah and his officers had no access to these stores.

But Tehran has learned that Israel was able to destroy most of the 22 Zelzal launchers provided.

That is not the end of the catalogue of misfortunes for the Islamic rulers of Iran.

1. The UN Security Council embodied in resolution 1701 a chapter requiring Hizballah to disarm – in the face of a stern warning issued by supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in person in the early days of the war. Revolutionary Guards commanders went so far as to boast: “No one alive is capable of disarming Hizballah.”

The disarming of Hizballah would therefore be a bad knock to the supreme ruler’s authority and prestige as well as a disastrous blow for the deterrent force so painstakingly and expensively fashioned as a second front line to protect the Islamic republic from a safe distance.

2. Hizballah’s ejection from South Lebanon, if accomplished in the aftermath of the ceasefire, would moreover deprive Tehran of the sword hanging over Israel’s head of instantaneous attack.

For the sake of partial damage control, Tehran handed Nasrallah a set of new instructions Sunday, Aug. 13:

First, to find a way of evading the ceasefire and keeping up war operations against Israeli forces.

Second, to reject the proposal to disarm before the Lebanese government meets on this Monday afternoon. In fact, that meeting was called off after Hassan Nasrallah sent a message to the Lebanese ministers flatly refusing to have Hizballah give up its weapons in the south. He also turned down a compromise proposal handed him later, whereby the Lebanese army’s first mission after deploying in the south would be to help Hizballah evacuate its fighters with their arms to positions north of the Litani River.

The strategy evolving in Tehran since the ceasefire went into effect Monday morning requires Hizballah to employ a range of stratagems – not only to prevent the truce from stabilizing but to stop the Lebanese army from deploying n the south and, above all, the entry of an effective international force.

Furthermore, Hizballah is instructed to stretch the military crisis into the next three of four months, synchronously with the timetable for a UN Security Council sanctions-wielding session on Iran.

According to exclusive reports reaching DEBKAfile’s sources, the Iranian government believes that Israel and the United States are preparing a military operation for the coming October and November to strike Iran’s nuclear installations. It is therefore vital to keep the two armies fully occupied with other pursuits.

Iranian leaders’ conviction that the Lebanon war was staged to bamboozle them rests on certain perceptions:

As seen from Tehran, Israel looked as though it was carrying out a warming-up exercise in preparation for its main action against Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli army was able to explore, discover and correct its weak points, understand what was lacking and apply the necessary remedial measures. They therefore expect the IDF to emerge from the war having produced novel methods of warfare.

They also have no doubt that the United States will replenish Israel’s war chest with a substantial aid program of new and improved weaponry.

From the Iranian viewpoint, Israel succeeded in seriously degrading Hizballah’s capabilities. It was also able to throw the Lebanese Shiite militia to the wolves; the West is now in a position to force Nasrallah and his men to quit southern Lebanon and disarm. The West shut its eyes when he flouted the Resolution 1559 order for the disarmament of all Lebanese militias. But that game is over. The Americans will use Resolution 1701 as an effect weapon to squeeze Iran, denied of its second-front deterrence, on its nuclear program.

Tehran hopes to pre-empt the American move by torpedoing the Lebanon ceasefire and preventing the termination of hostilities at all costs.

===============

This seems rosy to say the least, but it is interesting to consider a realist's perspective from Tehran's point of view.

[Flip McWho]

Yes, but worst for Iran. It would likely cause a worldwide recession, as well as a be significant impetus to move away from oil as an energy source. But it beats the hell out of exchanging nukes.

Righteo, and moving away from oil can't be a bad thing.

[Sandman]

According to Jewish Agency estimates, 24,000 people from countries around the world will immigrate to Israel in the course of 2006, up from the 22,657 people who made aliyah in 2005.

More than matched by emigration, I expect.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Sikander
An interesting take from DEBKA (whose reliability I can make no claim for):

http://debka.com/article.php?aid=1201

This seems rosy to say the least, but it is interesting to consider a realist's perspective from Tehran's point of view.

I find this report pretty, well, funny.

Certainly Hizbullah's current offensive military ability is diminished, but hist political importance has gone up, the US's stature has gone down, and the Arab states have been chastened. I failt o see who a politically positive outcome in the sense of local public opinion harms Iran, when the debate about its nuclear program is a POLITICAL one. The likelyhood of a US military strike vs. Iran is low, and the main tool for Iran to get back at the uS lie in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for "deterring" the IDF, an Israeli attack on Iran would be a huge political boost for Iran, while the IAF would not be able to do significant damage to its nuclear program.

[GePap]

A better sourced article:

The Overview
Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 15 — As stunned Lebanese returned Tuesday over broken roads to shattered apartments in the south, it increasingly seemed that the beneficiary of the destruction was most likely to be Hezbollah.

A major reason — in addition to its hard-won reputation as the only Arab force that fought Israel to a standstill — is that it is already dominating the efforts to rebuild with a torrent of money from oil-rich Iran.

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country’s minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an “unlimited budget” for reconstruction.

In his victory speech on Monday night, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, offered money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war.

“Completing the victory,” he said, “can come with reconstruction.”

On Tuesday, Israel began to pull many of its reserve troops out of southern Lebanon, and its military chief of staff said all of the soldiers could be back across the border within 10 days. Lebanese soldiers are expected to begin moving in a couple of days, supported by the first of 15,000 foreign troops.

While the Israelis began their withdrawal, hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.

In Sreifa, a Hezbollah official said the group would offer an initial $10,000 to residents to help pay for the year of rent, to buy new furniture and to help feed families.

In Taibe, a town of fighting so heavy that large chunks were missing from walls and buildings where they had been sprayed with bullets, the Audi family stood with two Hezbollah volunteers, looking woefully at their windowless, bullet- and shrapnel-torn house.

In Bint Jbail, Hezbollah ambulances — large, new cars with flashing lights on the top — ferried bodies of fighters to graves out of mountains of rubble.

Hezbollah’s reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network — as opposed to the Lebanese government, regarded by many here as sleek men in suits doing well — was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage.

“Hezbollah’s strength,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University here, who has written extensively about the organization, in large part derives from “the gross vacuum left by the state.”

Hezbollah was not, she said, a state within a state, but rather “a state within a nonstate, actually.”

Sheik Nasrallah said in his speech that “the brothers in the towns and villages will turn to those whose homes are badly damaged and help rebuild them.

“Today is the day to keep up our promises,” he said. “All our brothers will be in your service starting tomorrow.”

Some southern towns were so damaged that on Tuesday residents had not yet begun to return. A fighter for the Amal movement, another Shiite militia group, said he had been told that Hezbollah members would begin to catalog damages in his town, Kafr Kila, on the Israeli border.

Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed.

Although Hezbollah is a Shiite organization, Sheik Nasrallah’s message resounded even with a Sunni Muslim, Ghaleb Jazi, 40, who works at the oil storage plant at Jiyeh, 15 miles south of Beirut. It was bombed by the Israelis and spewed pollution northward into the Mediterranean.

“The government may do some work on bridges and roads, but when it comes to rebuilding houses, Hezbollah will have a big role to play,” he said. “Nasrallah said yesterday he would rebuild, and he will come through.”

Sheik Nasrallah’s speech was interpreted by some as a kind of watershed in Lebanese politics, establishing his group on an equal footing with the official government.

“It was a coup d’état,” said Jad al-Akjaoui, a political analyst aligned with the democratic reform bloc. He was among the organizers of the anti-Syrian demonstrations after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri two years ago that led to international pressure to rid Lebanon of 15 years of Syrian control.

Rami G. Khouri, a columnist for The Daily Star in Beirut, wrote that Sheik Nasrallah “seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon’s rich mosaic of political parties.”

“In tone and content, his remarks seemed more like those of a president or a prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering,” Mr. Khouri wrote. “His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.”

Defense Minister Elias Murr said Tuesday that the government would not seek to disarm Hezbollah.

“The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not,” he said, showing just how difficult reining in the militia will most likely be in the coming weeks and months. He added that “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah, had been cooperating with the government and there was no need to confront it.

Sheik Nasrallah sounded much like a governor responding to a disaster when he said, “So far, the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units.

“We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while,” he said. He also cautioned, “No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand.”

Support for Hezbollah was likely to become stronger, Professor Saad-Ghorayeb said, because of the weakness of the central government.

“Hezbollah has two pillars of support,” she said, “the resistance and the social services. What this war has illustrated is that it is best at both.

Referring to Shiek Nasrallah, she said: “He tells the people, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to protect you. And we’re going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver.’ ”

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Sreifa, Lebanon, for this article, Sabrina Tavernise from Taibe and Robert F. Worth from Jiyeh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/world/middleeast/16hezbollah.html?hp&ex=1155787200&en=cff9f8a0eef01127&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[GePap]

Just wanted to post this here because it is absurd that this following collumn appears in a major Israeli newspaper, but would probably never make its way into an American newspaper.

I have always found it refreshing at least that the debate inside Israel about Israel is far more honest than any debate in the US, about anything really, but particulalrly Israel.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750978.html

Nasrallah didn't mean to
By Amira Hass

During the past month, Hezbollah's Katyushas killed 18 Israeli Arabs among the 41 Israeli civilians who died in the war. Clearly, Hassan Nasrallah didn't mean to kill them. But as someone who knows that many Arabs live in northern Israel, and as someone who knows that the launchers for his inaccurate Katyushas cannot choose the target they will hit - the fact that it was unintended is meaningless.

More than anyone, Israelis should understand Nasrallah's claims that this was "unintended," identify with the primacy he attaches to the "unintendedness" relative to the fatal results, and identify with the disjunction he creates between the rationale that is inherent in the war machine he has built and his subjective will. "We didn't mean to" is a mantra that is frequently recited in Israel when there is a discussion of the number of civilians - among them many children - who are killed by the Israel Defense Forces. To this, the claim that "they" (Hezbollah and the Palestinians) cynically exploit civilians by locating themselves among them and firing from their midst is automatically added.

This claim is made by citizens of a state who know very well where to turn off Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv to get to the security-military complex that is located in the heart of their civilian city; this claim is repeated by the parents of armed soldiers who bring their weapons home on weekends, and is recited by soldiers whose bases are adjacent to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who have shelled civilian Palestinian neighborhoods from positions and tanks that have been stationed inside civilian settlements.

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"We didn't mean to" is the cousin of "I didn't know," and both of them are close neighbors of the double standard. What is permitted to us is forbidden to others. What hurts us does not hurt others (because they are "other").

IDF soldiers have killed 44 children in Gaza since June 28, when the failed campaign to release abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit began. That is 44 children out of the 188 people the IDF has killed in Gaza - civilians and armed men, most of whom had embarked on a doomed fight against the invading tanks. The last three who were killed, on Monday, were three farmers from Beit Hanoun who were hit by an IDF shell - about as precise as a Hezbollah Katyusha - instead of the rocket launcher it had been intended to hit.

The road to killing children by a military and civilian occupation machine is paved with many non-intentions to cause other damage to civilians; these are not fatal immediately, but day by day, they take away the taste of life from 3.5 million people. These are damages that in ordinary times earn, at best, a mention the size of a postage stamp in the newspapers.

But these are the essential building stones of a regime of dispossession, the aim of which is to thwart the Palestinian people's aspirations for independence and sovereignty in its country. The callousness and cruelty that are required for carrying this out have become second nature for hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Unintentionally. Here are a number of typical examples: the identity card that a soldier confiscated in the middle of the night, which then gets lost, and its bearer cannot move on the roads and travel to work and has to pay a fortune, in his terms, for a new one; endless delays in the hot sun at roadblocks and at Civil Administration counters (and more loss of workdays); land confiscation orders; new blockages of village entrances; preventing the exit of all those between the ages of 16 and 53 from Tul Karm and Nablus; paving a new road to a Jewish settlement; preventing a Palestinian family's return to its West Bank home; cutting off another home from its village and lands via the advanced separation barrier; preventing family visits to prisoners. There is no end to these damages; one book could not contain them all.

When it suits him, the Israeli is part of the collective. Therefore, every terror attack and Katyusha are aimed "against the Jewish people" - which, of course, always authorizes Israel to embark on punishment campaigns that are defined as existential war. And when it suits him, the Israeli denies his partnership in the collective, in the occupation machinery to which he is a partner. He ignores the inevitable implications of the machinery that controls, in an authoritarian way, the lives of 3.5 million people who did not elect it (the Palestinian Authority was from the outset a fiction of government, with no authority).

On the one hand, the Israeli who "doesn't intend" cuts himself off from the Israeli occupation and colonialism machine, and exempts himself from the responsibility for the intention to harm Palestinian civilians, an intention that is inherent in the very existence of an occupation machinery. And on the other hand, he cuts the Palestinian response off from the existence of the occupation machine: After all, they as individuals and as a collective "intended to harm civilians," and this because of their eternal essence as Muslims, as Arabs - which is independent of us.

[GePap]

At this point, why read worthless American news coverage (the only worthwhile stuff comes from a few big papers like the NYT and WaPo and the AP, when you can read better coverage from local papers themselves?

And form the Daily Star, showing that the English press in Lebanon is also open to a variety of views:

The somber dream of a garrison state

By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, August 17, 2006

Near the end of his speech on Monday, Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, began sounding, ominously, like a president. I say ominously, because Nasrallah has not been elected president, though the current tenant of that office does make us pine for better. In outlining his vision of a stronger state, the Hizbullah leader plainly implied he intended to help reshape that state, and how else would he do so except by bending it around his own party's priorities?

On the same day there was an intriguing headline in the new daily newspaper Al-Akhbar, which, once you've worked out the intricacies of its financing and the identity of its journalists, mainly situates itself in the March 8 camp, close to Hizbullah, with some splashes of Aounism. The headline read: "A Government of National Unity, to Prevent 'Faulty Calculations.'" Given that the story cut to the national unity government idea editorially, without it being based on a specific news item or quote, it seemed more a warning than anything else.

Then on Tuesday we heard Bashar Assad effectively call for a coup d'etat against the March 14 majority. The Syrian president declared that Hizbullah should transform its military "victory" in the South into a political victory in Beirut, and accused March 14 of being the intended beneficiaries of Israel's onslaught. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, sensing a Syrian effort to re-impose its control over Lebanon, will hold a press conference this morning to start mobilizing the majority, which has seemed extraordinarily faint-hearted in recent weeks.

Yet March 14 should profit from Hizbullah's constraints. Unless implementation of Resolution 1701 fails and the war resumes, in the foreseeable future Hizbullah will be cut off from its vital space in South Lebanon. This doesn't mean the party intends to withdraw its men from the South or crack open its weapons caches to the Lebanese Army and the expanded United Nations force. If anything, Hizbullah seeks to empty the UN resolution of its content. And unless Prime Minister Fouad Siniora takes a firmer position in favor of a complete demilitarization of the area south of the Litani River, he risks losing his credibility at the Security Council. But there is a good possibility that one thing will change in the short term, namely Hizbullah's ability to raise and lower the temperature in the border area. Nasrallah may be declaring victory, but with hundreds of thousands of his coreligionists rebuilding their homes and lives, Hizbullah's latitude to fire at Israel, and to do so amid a UN force reflecting an international consensus, will be relatively small.

This raises the question of whether Nasrallah will compensate by turning his attention to the domestic front. If the secretary general is so keen to build up a strong Lebanese state, presumably he intends to contribute to that effort from a position of authority. So, is Nasrallah on the verge of taking that authority, flush from his tactical triumphs in the South and motivated by an understandable desire to draw attention away from the devastation inflicted on the Shiite community since July 12?

If the answer is yes, then we must consider the mechanism of a sudden accumulation of greater power. This brings us back to a government of national unity. For some time, the Aounists have regretted their decision to be an opposition party in Parliament, without power. But what they have regretted more is that Hizbullah has done nothing at all to bring them into the Siniora Cabinet. Now this may change. If there is anything explaining Michel Aoun's fresh rabidness against the government (in an Al-Akhbar interview, no less), it is that he feels, apparently like Assad, that the time is ripe to do away with the present government majority.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb

Nasrallah may soon agree, insisting that Hizbullah, along with the Aounists and other groups in the country, particularly those close to Syria, are entitled to more ministerial portfolios. He could justify this on the grounds that Lebanon's reconstruction demands national concord. Would Nasrallah succeed? Maybe not, because Parliament would still need to vote confidence in a new government, and the March 14 majority does not want to lose its dominance. But the pressure could mount, so that the fallback position would be to grant Hizbullah and the Aounists a third of Cabinet seats plus one, allowing them to block votes on major policy. Lurking over this would be Hizbullah's militants, angry with the majority and eager to build up a system defending the "resistance option."

That's, of course, just one scenario. There are those who will argue that Nasrallah is more cornered than his coolness suggests. He may have declared a historic victory, but Lebanon has already started focusing on the price of that victory, whether in monetary terms or in terms of unemployment, emigration, opportunity costs, investor confidence, and much else. Nasrallah's supporters might buy into his rhetoric, but businessmen won't. With a debt of some $40 billion and losses estimated at between $6 billion and $10 billion, for a GDP languishing at just above $20 billion, the shadow of a general economic collapse remains near.

Shiites would suffer as much as anyone else from such a calamity - probably worse given their current vulnerabilities. And the reality is that when international donors or investors look to Lebanon, they don't feel particularly comfortable with a political and paramilitary organization that announces its passion for martyrdom; they look to those people that Nasrallah has criticized for failing to adequately defend his choices: Siniora and the bland technocrats of the Hariri-led reconstruction era. Whatever Nasrallah and Aoun think of this reality, neither man has the credibility to put Lebanon on even a tolerable economic footing.

So, what did Nasrallah mean by a strong state? You have to imagine that he was in part thinking of his "defensive plan," whereby Lebanon would essentially ask Hizbullah to be a vanguard in facing down permanent Israeli threats. But since that plan has gone nowhere, since it effectively brought Israel back into Lebanon, Hizbullah must have a newer version in hand. But would the Lebanese go along with seeing their languid Mediterranean playground transformed into a somber garrison state?

That's where Nasrallah must be more amenable to the odd psychology of Lebanese society, all compromises and consensus and winks and nods. The Hizbullah leader is no aficionado of this. As he remarked at a May 2003 rally, Lebanon needed "great men and great leaders, not leaders of alleyways, of confessional groups, of districts." But that's who Nasrallah will have to deal with if he decides to transform the state into something stronger, and he'll have to accept that many of his countrymen don't want a stronger state if it means living in a gigantic Hizbullah barracks.

It is doubtless time for everyone to be modest, both Nasrallah and his March 14 rivals. Lebanon will fall back into civil war before it accepts the hegemony of one side over the other, before one side imposes its version of the state over that of the others. One truth stands out, though: Lebanon can no longer afford to be a playground for proxy wars, since what will emerge is not a stronger state, but no state at all.

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=74782

[TCO]

Euros are effete ****s.

[Thorgal]

I have always found it refreshing at least that the debate inside Israel about Israel is far more honest than any debate in the US, about anything really, but particulalrly Israel.

Yep, generally i have always found the Israelies themselves more objective and open minded about Israel issues in general than USAians. The level of brainwashing in USA is totally amazing.

[Eli]

Originally posted by Thorgal

Yep, generally i have always found the Israelies themselves more objective and open minded about Israel issues in general than USAians. The level of brainwashing in USA is totally amazing.

A friend of mine recenty returned from a trip to the US. He said he followed only FOX News and that more often than not they were an order of magnitude more supportive of Israel and less critical of it's mistakes than the Israeli media itself.

[Spiffor]

My impression is that the Israelis are aware they're not absolutely always the good guys doing the right thing. In my perception, the Israelis know they do some really ugly things, and that's generally acceptable, not because they feel as the "good guys", but simply because they're team.

Apparently, the Yanks want to believe really hard that Israel are the good guys, and are fighting villains.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Thorgal

Yep, generally i have always found the Israelies themselves more objective and open minded about Israel issues in general than USAians. The level of brainwashing in USA is totally amazing.

That's some amazing brainwashing, where the same monolithic media manage to brainwash those who support Israel and those who don't simultaneously. Or maybe you're just full of sh!t.

[Ecthy]

Sikander I must agree with Thor to a degree. I've always found the arguing of Israeli posters to be very realistic and open e.g. in terms of expressing interest, while USians usually just argue in very emotional ways and have no clue.

[Thorgal]

That's some amazing brainwashing, where the same monolithic media manage to brainwash those who support Israel and those who don't simultaneously.

Care to elaborate?

Very brainwashed reaction btw.