| By Jonathan on Palestine/Middle East It's hard to escape the sickening feeling that Israel is working with the Bush administration to create a crisis where an attack on Iran becomes inevitable. Certainly the scale of the Israeli attacks is so far out of proportion with the claimed provocation that one has to assume that the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers was merely the excuse for an operation that had already been planned. And now with the night-time bombing of the fuel depot at the Beirut airport, we have a visual that will inflame the anger of untold millions of people in the Middle East and around the world. Who can doubt that Israel knew how it was going to look on the world's tv screens? What else is one to think but that the goal is to invite more "provocations" to give Israel a pretext for widening the war even further? Is there anyone who imagines that Israel would take these steps without first conferring with the US? How long before they pin blame on Iran? Or Syria? Or both? It's hard not to think of Ron Suskind's famous conversation with a senior Bush aide. Suskind: The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." I hope I'm wrong, but I fear we have just taken a sharp turn into much darker territory. |
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