By Reason Wafawarova

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

THE recent military madness launched by Israel on innocent civilians in southern Lebanon should be understood in its American context if any permanent solution is to be found.

Since the dramatic fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the US has pushed for its weird idea of a New World Order arrogantly based on an evidently hollow and amoral foreign policy.

So far the US has made 35 invasions of foreign states in the name of military intervention and it might be safe to just add Lebanon as victim number 36, because the attack is being dutifully executed by the traditional US puppet and ally, Israel.

At the peak of the Cold War in the 1980s, the US fought many direct and proxy wars against socialist and communist countries and perfected the artistry of aggression by invading countries like Panama and Grenada without remorse.

Americans embarked on proxy wars with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in countries like Mozambique where they partnered the South African apartheid regime with a shameless puppet rebel movement calling itself Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) led by the partially reformed opposition leader, Alfonso Dhlakama.

Uncle Sam’s idea was to bring down Cde Samora Machel whom he viewed as Communism’s point man in East and Southern Africa. Of course, the Americans only rested after they exterminated Cde Machel in that primitive air crush assassination on October 19 1986 on apartheid South African soil.

They were behind another proxy war against the Soviet Union in Angola where they funded and armed one of the most primitive doctors ever to emerge from academia; a military lunatic called Jonasi Savimbi who met his well-deserved death by the sword.

In 1987 Uncle Sam was uncomfortable with a 37-year-old leader, Thomas Sankara, who had spearheaded a successful socialist/communist four-year revolution in Burkina Faso. The US sponsored a group of anti-revolutionaries who brutally shot and killed the Burkinabe leader along with 12 of his bodyguards.

It is important to note that American hegemony has been sustained by powerful, irrational media houses that have perfected the art of creating and manufacturing "tyrants, despots, terrorists, dictators, totalitarian regimes" and many other pejorative terms against people who threaten the US agenda of world domination.

Now we are told that the capturing of two soldiers in a long-standing border dispute between Lebanon and Israel warranted the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in Beirut.

Israel has bombarded private homes with tonnes of American-made bombs and the powerful Western media houses called it "the right of Israelis" to defend themselves, but when the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, retaliated by launching hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, the counter-strikes were equated to acts of aggression.

Such is the power of the Western media that it can repackage an aggressor as a defendant and a defendant as an aggressor.

It is clear that the war in Lebanon was yet another proxy war that pitted the US, fronted by Israel, against Hezbollah, reportedly backed by Iran and Syria.

The attack on Qana by Israel embodied the seemingly elusive definition of terrorism, yet all the United Nations Security Council issued was the flimsy announcement that the act ‘‘could be a breach of International Law".

How disgusting it was to see the world body succumbing to American pressure the same way it did during the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq.

When Americans are not using the media to misinform the world and create "dictators" out of non-compliant world leaders, they would be busy organising coups to set up pliant dictatorships elsewhere.

In other cases, they would be funding puppet opposition political parties or arm-twisting smaller nations to sign and ratify the International Criminal Court provisions while absolving themselves of the obligations deriving from such protocols.

For instance, Uncle Sam spearheaded the promulgation of the Law of the Sea that says all water, 200 miles (320 kilometres) from the coast, is international water but refuses to sign the treaty while threatening sanctions against smaller countries that refuse to sign.

When their primitive actions threaten to catch up with them at home politically, US administrations come up with diversionary tactics like instructing Israel to start bombing Lebanon or threatening their own people with fabricated reports that Iran or North Korea was about to destroy the whole world.

It is important to note that Uncle Sam and his allies, led by Britain, seem to have too much on their hands right now and will soon have to give concessions and lose a bit of ground and face as well, for the alternative is imminent defeat on many fronts.

Uncle Sam has unfinished business in Afghanistan and Iraq, a proxy war in Lebanon and Palestine, a stand-off with Iran and Syria, a fight from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, embarrassment from the firming Cuban revolution and threats from the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

The North Koreans are adamant that they will become a nuclear power, the Chinese and Russians refuse to play ball in the Security Council, not forgetting tiny Zimbabwe that, in Bush’s own words, ‘‘continues to pose a continuing and unusual threat to American foreign policy’’.

As if this was not enough, China’s growing influence threatens to knock him (Uncle Sam) off the superpower pedestal.

It seems things are not so rosy for the bully that has arm-twisted many nations with impunity throughout the 61 years the UN has been in existence.