Lebanon: A victory against the New World Order?

The ‘cessation of hostilities’ in Lebanon, (i.e. of the Zionist attack against its people), under humiliating conditions for the Zionist army ―which used to enjoy in the past successive victories leading to a continuous expansion of Israel― was a surprise to some, whereas to others it was utterly expected. It was not, anyway, the first time that this has happened. As recently as 1996, Hezbollah was sending again Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and Shimon Peres of the ‘progressive’ Labour Party was also following the same scorched-earth policy as Olmert, with the aim of driving out the local population through mass bombing of the infrastructure and allowing the Zionist army to crush Hezbollah. Although Peres managed at the time to drive 400,000 people from their homes, creating in the process similar hecatombs as today including the murder of 102 civilians taking refuge in the village of Qana (yet again!), the operation failed to dismantle Hezbollah. Despite this dismal failure, Zionists attempted to occupy South Lebanon, until they realised by 2000 that such an occupation was unsustainable. It now seems, however, that they have learned a lesson from previous failures: if evicting Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon, through the use of Israeli military power, was impossible and a permanent occupation of it was non feasible, attempting to de-activate it through the use of the Lebanese army and the ‘peace-keeping’ force of the ‘international community’ (read: the transnational elite and those dependent on it) might be worth trying.

Although therefore, the military outcome of the new Zionist campaign was for several military analysts well anticipated, it is now clear that the pre-planned[1] attack of Israel with the collusion of the military leadership of the transnational elite did not aim at a military victory as such ―without of course expecting the sort of damage they suffered in the hands of Hezbollah!— but, mainly, to a diplomatic victory. This sort of victory was almost guaranteed by the predominance in the UN of the transnational elite (USA and EU) and its allies in the Russian and Chinese elites, the former being keen to secure entry into the World Trade Organisation (the Bush Administration aptly postponed a decision on this last month, presumably, in order to blackmail the Russian elite to support it in Lebanon and Iran) and the latter having to protect its economic ‘miracle’, which crucially depends on foreign investment and exports to the members of the transnational elite. In other words, it seems that their plan has always been to de-activate Hezbollah, through the establishment of an extended ‘safety zone’ between the Israel-Lebanon borders and the Litani River, which will be “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL”, as prescribed by Resolution 1701 passed unanimously by the transnational elite and its allies. Their hope is that this ‘peace-keeping’ force, consisting of contingents from the armies of several members of the transnational elite and its allies, will achieve what Zionists could not achieve in the previous quarter of a century or so! Furthermore, given that the core of this force will be the politically divided Lebanese army (which did not manage to fire a shot while the country, it was supposed to protect, was being smashed into pieces!), this development is highly likely to lead to a new civil conflict inside Lebanon, further undermining the resistance against the transnational elite and the Zionists in the Middle East.

There are several important conclusions to be drawn from the above. As Western military analysts admit,[2] the superior fire-power of the transnational elite and Israel could become relevant only in a conflict with regular armies, when they can easily destroy any inferior regular army, as well as the infrastructure of the country concerned and at the same time terrorise the resisting peoples through massive and murderous air bombardments. This superiority however, is incapable of securing the control of these peoples, as it is shown by the military fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. If a guerrilla movement enjoys the support of a significant section of the local people then it is able to "move among the people like a fish in water", according to the memorable description of Mao Zedong in the 1920s.

However, although it is true that the elites cannot achieve a clear victory in asymmetric warfare (the military term for fighting irregular forces with conventional forces) the same applies to the guerrillas, who today seem also incapable of achieving a clear victory against the elites and the New World Order, which they are in the process of establishing all over the world—a victory in the sense of throwing them away, as it happened in Vietnam. It seems very difficult if not impossible today for the Iraqis, the Afghans, or the Palestinians to throw away the occupying forces from their own countries, whatever sacrifices they might endure and whatever losses they can cause to them.

The crucial question therefore can be summed up as follows: is the victory of a national liberation movement against the New World Order possible today? In order to give an answer to this question I think that we must first define the preconditions for such a victory. The historical comparison with the Vietnamese movement is particularly illuminating here, since it is clear that this movement was victorious not only because it was not possible to be crushed by a regular army (as it also happens today), but also because a number of other conditions were met in the Vietnamese case which are not however satisfied in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or Lebanon. These conditions, as explained below, refer to the movement itself, the elites and the international balance of power.

As far as today’s national liberation movements are concerned, an important characteristic is that, unlike the Vietnamese movement, their ideology is a mix of an anti-imperialist ideology with a religious irrationalism. This is a crucial characteristic because it helps enormously both the transnational elite in its aim to ‘divide and rule’ and the reformist intelligentsia of the ‘Left’ (including the libertarian one!) in its effort to keep a policy of ‘equal distances’ from oppressors and oppressed.

As far as the elites are concerned, Vietnam taught them many useful lessons. Thus, the elites do not have to worry about the effect that the army losses would have on the middle classes (which nowadays determines the outcome of electoral contests), as present armies consist of mercenaries recruited from the weakest social strata, which are also the main victims of capitalist neoliberal globalisation. Furthermore, the control exercised by the transnational elite over the mass media, in the present era of neoliberal modernity, bears no comparison to any similar control by the elites in the 1960s, when markets, including the media markets, were still regulated. No wonder that in the West, in the last few weeks, TV viewers were basically fed with pictures stressing the human and material consequences of the ‘terrorist’ Hezbollah attacks and minimising the multiple losses caused by the terrorist attacks of the Zionist state,[3] which was presented as a self-defending victim of aggression!

Finally, as far as the international balance of power is concerned, the eclipse of the Soviet camp has played a defining role with respect to the outcome of the national liberation struggles. Not only directly, given that this camp had every interest in undermining the power of the West, but also indirectly. There is no doubt that had the Soviet camp been still around, neither the mercenary armies would have been sufficient to match the huge military power of this camp, nor the reformist Left of ‘equal distances’ would have been dominant —as it is today―, or, for that matter, the transnational elite would have been able to exercise the same absolute control over the mass media, as at present.

The consequence of the fact that the above conditions are not met today is that no clear military victories on either side are possible anymore, but only compromises, the content of which varies according to the degree of radicalisation of the movements concerned: the lower the degree of radicalisation, the easier the splitting of the resisting peoples is and the closer the content of these compromises to the aims of the New World Order. It is this scenario which plays again and again all over the world: from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Middle East…

* The above text is an extended version of an article which was first published in the fortnightly column of Takis Fotopoulos in the mass circulation Athens daily Eleftherotypia on 19/8/2006

[1] According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for an attack on Lebanon, New Yorker, August 21, 2006.
[2] Amyas Godfrey, ‘Wrong weapons, wrong targets’, The Guardian, 3 & 10/8/06.
[3] see e.g. Andrew Gumbel, ‘America's one-eyed view of war: Stars, stripes, and the Star of David’, Independent, 15/8/06.