The Daily Background

This is so bizarre. President Bush has declared that Hezbollah has been ‘defeated’ following the ceasefire which took effect this morning. Even the Israeli government is not claiming this.

Israel violated international law by breaking the ceasefire and killed a half dozen people it said were Hezbollah militants a few hours after it took effect and has offered no explanation. Hezbollah has not violated the ceasefire at all, although only yesterday it fired 250 rockets into Israel. This, from a group that is according to President Bush “defeated.”

President Bush also proclaimed that Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of Lebanese civilians (which the Israeli military killed), and the war in general.

This, after a report from the very well respected Pulitzer-prize-winning veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh which said that Washington had been co-planning the Israeli offensive for months and merely used Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers who had illegally crossed the Lebanese border on a secret mission as a pretext for the planned bombing campaign.

Hersh writes that his sources tell him the bombing campaign which Israel executed against Hezbollah (in which Lebanese civilians took the vast majority of the casualties) was planned as a test of a bombing template which the United States could potentially use against Iran in 2007. Vice President Cheney’s office is said to be at the center of these plans, just as his office was at the center of pre-war plans for Iraq.

You can find a video of Hersh explaining his findings to CNN host Wolf Blitzer here, as well as links to his new article in the New Yorker.

Filed under: Middle East Crisis, Z-TDB Blog