THE BIGGER STORY
(Update: The AP has a story providing additional details on the attack on the Israeli missile cruiser. Via memeorandum).
I'm not always in agreement with The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, but in the context of the current Israel vs. Hezbollah/Syria/Iran via Lebanon mid-east crisis, I do think he offers a different context than a lot of mainstream media reports. Specifically, he says:
"WHY IS THIS ARAB-ISRAELI WAR different from all other Arab-Israeli wars? Because it's not an Arab-Israeli war. Most of Israel's traditional Arab enemies have checked out of the current conflict.
The governments of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are, to say the least, indifferent to the fate of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Palestine Liberation Organization (Fatah) isn't a player. The prime mover behind the terrorist groups who have started this war is a non-Arab state, Iran, which wasn't involved in any of Israel's previous wars.
What's happening in the Middle East, then, isn't just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What's happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West--but is India part of the West? Better to say that what's under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States."
One might say that this is just a shifting of labels.
But clarity in the underlying political motives of all the parties involved, is potentially helped by this particular re-labeling.
In the meantime, one can only empathize with the plight of middle-of-the-road ordinary Lebanese caught in the middle of all this, with literally nowhere to run. This post in the Lebanese Political Journal expresses the local anger against Israel with poignancy:
"Where am I going? Syria. Didn't want to, but I have to. The people we marched against are the ones you sent us begging to. The people who assassinated our leaders, kept us from having an operating democracy, and who armed Hezbollah are laughing it up because they've won the game because of you."
The New York Times, while echoing the world's sympathy with the situation Israel finds itself on it's borders with Gaza and Lebanon, urges it's leadership to "Not Play Hamas's Game":
"Israel needs to be careful that its far-reaching military responses, however legally and morally justified, do not end up advancing the political agenda that Hamas and Hezbollah hard-liners had in mind when they conceived and executed the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers that detonated the fighting."
One can only assume the Hezbollah/Syrian/Iranian orchestrators of all this thought through the chess moves when this game got started by the kidnappings.
How else to account for their ability to have ready to fire Chinese silkworm missiles OR unmanned aerial drones armed with explosives, with which to hit Israel's most modern warship off the shores of Beirut, killing Israeli sailors and damaging the ship enough for it to return to Israel?
A bad situation all around, with limited, bad, "lose-lose" choices for Israel, the United States, and the "West" broadly and globally defined.
The mainstream media continues to frame this crisis in the US in
terms of upwards shocks to world oil prices, missing the broader
political machinations. The focus is either on how higher oil prices
are hurting the US consumer, or how countries like Iran are benefiting
from these increases.
For instance, noted global authority on oil matters, Daniel Yergin, explained on MSNBC earlier today that a ten dollar per barrel increase in world prices translates into $170 million per week for Iran. I'd dare say while the extra money is nice icing on the cake, the broader political stakes are more the motivating factors for Iran's leaders in this particular proxy war.
We need better mainstream reporting of the second and third derivative political motivations of the various parties not just in this crisis, but other situations like North Korea.
And not just focus on tit for tat attacks going back and forth, pictures of explosions and burning buildings, missile animations, and scenes of mayhem on the ground.
It's a chess game, not Pong.
All the politicians and mainstream media representatives involved should continue to keep that in mind, regardless of the short-term political and economic incentives to play Pong.
Comments