Posted on 07/22/2006 9:36:52 AM PDT by Valin
(Page 216) Perhaps this impasse between America and the Shia was inevitable all along. The Israeli experience with the Shis of Lebanon, in the aftermath of Israel's Lebanon war of 1982 was a forerunner of what awaited the Americans in Iraq. The analogy is not perfect in everyway, but that war in Lebanon was for the Shia of that country a war of deliverance. Israel had swept into Lebanon, it should be recalled in the summer of 1982, to put an end to the Palestinian sancuary. The people of southern Lebanon's towns and villages who had endured Palestinian anarchy and bravado over the preceding decade, received the Israelis with rice and flowers. Israel had for all practical purposes been midwife of a Shia resurgence in Lebanon: it had defeated and banished the Palestinians, doing for the Shia what had not been able to do for themselves.
But wars of liberations have a short shelf life, it turns out. The liberated have a way of forgetting the old tyranny and of wanting the new alien rulers to pack up and leave. The Shis now wanted Israel out of their land. On the coattails of the Israelis, local (principally Christian) militas had stepped forth to claim new power for themselves. No Shia political movements of any standing or independence would embrace Israel in broad daylight. A year or so after the rice and flowers, the peace between Israel and the Shia had broken down. Trouble erupted on a particularly sysbolic day: October 16 1983, the day of Ashura, the tenth of the Muslims month of Muharram, commemorating the martydom of Imam Hussein. An armed Israeli convoy had coincidentally turned up in the southern Shis town of Nabatiyya on that day and had tried to make its way through the mourners and flagellants. Two people were killed, and several wounded.
The die was cast. The next day the highest Shia cleric in the land issued a fatwa calling for "civil obedience" and "resistance to occupation in the south". Dealing with Israel he said was "absolutely impermissible". Every generation, this cleric exhorted, has its own ghreat battle, makes its own choice: the believer can "soar and sacrifice," or he can "submit and betray". It didn't take long for the suicide bombers and the "martyr's' turned up. On November 4, a suicid driver struck the Israeli headquarters in the coastal city of Tyre. He was a young man, it was reported, around 20 years of age. It was a calamitous day for the Israelis: 60 people were killed, including 29 Israelis soldiers and security personal. Israel responded by closing a bridge that connected the southern hinterland to Beirut. Cliton Bailey, a thoughtful Israeli academic (and sympathetic scholar on the Bedouins of Negev and Sinai) who served as a liaison officer in southern Lebanon, summed up the impact: "The basis of the southern economy collapsed. It was this event that finally smashed the last friendly sentiments toward Israel." A relentlrss war had erupted between the Shis and the Israeli forces. In 1984 alone there were more than 900 attacks against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. The brigades of Hezbollah were not far behind. Israel held on in the ancestral lands of the Shia but was embattled. In the year 2000 a brave soldier and political leader Ehud Barak, liquidated that venture and walked away from Lebanon and the security zone Israel had established in southern Lebanon.
The Lesson: Muslims are nuts, and don't expect any alliance with them to hold for more than 6 months.
and don't expect any alliance with them to hold for more than 6 months.
Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Jordan? Qatar?
Got your broadbrush out there guy.
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