[LCM Articles] Robert Fisk's articles in the Independent

[Manar Ibrahim El-Chammas]

You can usually find these articles on blogs (blogsearch.google.com)

- Manar

Article 1:

What I am watching in Lebanon each day is an outrage

By Robert Fisk in Mdeirej, Central Lebanon

07/15/06 "The Independent"

The beautiful viaduct that soars over the mountainside here has become a
"terrorist" target. The Israelis attacked the international highway from
Beirut to Damascus just after dawn yesterday and dropped a bomb clean
through the central span of the Italian-built bridge a symbol of Lebanon's
co-operation with the European Union sending concrete crashing hundreds of
feet down into the valley beneath. It was the pride of the murdered
ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, the face of a new, emergent Lebanon. And
now it is a "terrorist" target.

So I drove gingerly along the old mountain road towards the Bekaa yesterday
- the Israeli jets were hissing through the sky above me - turned the
corner once I rejoined the highway, and found a 50ft crater with an old
woman climbing wearily down the side on her hands and knees, trying to
reach her home in the valley that glimmered to the east. This too had
become a "terrorist" target.

It is now the same all over Lebanon. In the southern suburbs - where the
Hizbollah, captors of the two missing Israeli soldiers, have their
headquarters - a massive bomb had blasted off the sides of apartment blocks
next to a church, splintering windows and crashing balconies down to parked
cars. This too had become a "terrorist target.

One man was brought out shrieking with pain, covered in blood. Another
"terrorist" target. All the way to the airport were broken bridges, holed
roads. All these were "terrorist" targets. At the airport, tongues of fire
blossomed into the sky from aircraft fuel storage tanks, darkening west
Beirut. These too were now "terrorist" targets.

At Jiyeh, the Israelis attacked the power station. This too was a
"terrorist" target.

Yet when I drove to the actual headquarters of Hizbollah, a tall building in
Haret Hreik, it was totally undamaged. Only last night did the Israelis
manage to hit it.

So can the Lebanese be forgiven - can anyone here be forgiven - for
believing that the Israelis have a greater interest in destroying Lebanon
than they do in their two soldiers?

No wonder Middle East Airlines, the national Lebanese airline, put crews
into its four stranded Airbuses at Beirut airport early yesterday and
sneaked them out of the country for Amman before the Israelis realised they
were under power and leaving.

European politicians have talked about Israel's "disproportionate" response
to Wednesday's capture of its soldiers. They are wrong. What I am now
watching in Lebanon is an outrage. How can there be any excuse for the 73
dead Lebanese blown these past three days?

The same applies, of course, to the four Israeli civilians killed by
Hizbollah rockets. But - please note the exchange rate of Israeli civilian
lives to Lebanese civilian lives now stands at 1 to more than 15. This does
not include the two children who were atomised in their home in Dweir on
Thursday and whose bodies cannot be found. Their six brothers and sisters
were buried yesterday, along with their mother and father. Another
"terrorist" target. So was a neighbouring family with five children who
were also buried yesterday. Another "terrorist" target.

Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist. There is something perverse about all this,
the slaughter and massive destruction and the self-righteous, constant,
cancerous use of the word "terrorist". No, let us not forget that the
Hizbollah broke international law, crossed the Israeli border, killed three
Israeli soldiers, captured two others and dragged them back through the
border fence. It was an act of calculated ruthlessness that should never
allow Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to grin so broadly ay his press
conference. It has brought unparalleled tragedy to countless innocents in
Lebanon. And of course, it has led Hizbollah to fire at least 170 Katyusha
rockets into Israel.

But what would happen if the powerless Lebanese government had actually
unleashed air attacks across Israel the last time Israel's troops crossed
into Lebanon? What if the Lebanese air force then killed 73 Israeli
civilians in bombing raids in Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Israeli West
Jerusalem? What if a Lebanese fighter aircraft bombed Ben Gurion airport?
What if a Lebanese plane destroyed 26 road bridges across Israel? Would it
not be called "terrorism"? I rather think it would. But if Israel was the
victim, it would also probably be Word War Three.

Of course, Lebanon cannot attack Tel Aviv. Its air force comprises three
ancient Hawker Hunters and an equally ancient fleet of Vietnam-era Huey
helicopters. Syria, however, has missiles that can reach Tel Aviv. So Syria
- which Israel rightly believes to be behind Wednesday's Hizbollah attack is
not going to be bombed. It is Lebanon which must be punished.

The Israeli leadership intends to "break" the Hizbollah and destroy its
"terrorist cancer". Really? Do the Israelis really believe they can "break"
one of the toughest guerrilla armies in the world? And how?

There are real issues here. Under UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - the
same resolution that got the Syrian army out of Lebanon - the Shia Muslim
Hizbollah should have been disarmed. They were not because, if the Lebanese
Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, had tried to do so, the Lebanese army would
have had to fight them and the army would almost certainly broken apart
because most Lebanese soldiers are Shia Muslims. We could see the
restarting of the civil war in Lebanon - a fact which Nasrallah is
cynically aware of - but attempts by Siniora and his cabinet colleagues to
find a new role for Hizbollah, which has a minister in the government (he
is Minister of Labour) foundered. And the greatest now is that the Lebanese
government will collapse and be replaced by a pro-Syrian government which
could re-invite the Syrians back into the country.

So there's a real conundrum to be solved. But it's not going to succeed with
the mass bombing of the country by Israel. Not the obsession with
terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Article 2:

Robert Fisk: Hizbollah’s response reveals months of planning
If Lebanese dislike Hizbollah, they hate Israelis

By Robert Fisk
07/16/06 | The Independent | informationclearinghouse.info

It will be called the massacre of Marwaheen. All the civilians killed by the
Israelis had been ordered to abandon their homes in the border village by
the Israelis themselves a few hours earlier. Leave, they were told by
loudspeaker; and leave they did, 20 of them in a convoy of civilian cars.
That’s when the Israeli jets arrived to bomb them, killing 20 Lebanese, at
least nine of them children. The local fire brigade could not put out the
fires as they all burned alive in the inferno. Another “terrorist” target
had been eliminated.

Yesterday, the Israelis even produced more “terrorist” targets - petrol
stations in the Bekaa Valley all the way up to the frontier city of Hermel
in northern Lebanon and another series of bridges on one of the few escape
routes to Damascus, this time between Chtaura and the border village of
Masnaa. Lebanon, as usual, was paying the price for the Hizbollah-Israeli
conflict - as Hizbollah no doubt calculated they would when they crossed
the Israeli frontier on Wednesday and captured two Israeli soldiers close
to Marwaheen.

But who is really winning the war? Not Lebanon, you may say, with its more
than 90 civilian dead and its infrastructure steadily destroyed in hundreds
of Israeli air raids. But is Israel winning? Friday night’s missile attack
on an Israeli warship off the coast of Lebanon suggests otherwise. Four
Israeli sailors were killed, two of them hurled into the sea when a
tele-guided Iranian-made missile smashed into their Hetz-class gunboat just
off Beirut at dusk. Those Lebanese who had endured the fire of Israeli
gunboats on the coastal highway over many years were elated. They may not
have liked Hizbollah - but they hated the Israelis.

Only now, however, is a truer picture emerging of the battle for southern
Lebanon and it is a fascinating, frightening tale. The original border
crossing, the capture of the two soldiers and the killing of three others
was planned, according to Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader who
escaped assassination by the Israelis on Friday evening, more than five
months ago. And Friday’s missile attack on the Israeli gunboat was not the
last-minute inspiration of a Hizbollah member who just happened to see the
warship.

It now appears clear that the Hizbollah leadership - Nasrallah used to be
the organisation’s military commander in southern Lebanon - thought
carefully through the effects of their border crossing, relying on the
cruelty of Israel’s response to quell any criticism of their action within
Lebanon. They were right in their planning. The Israeli retaliation was
even crueller than some Hizbollah leaders imagined, and the Lebanese
quickly silenced all criticism of the guerrilla movement.

Hizbollah had presumed the Israelis would cross into Lebanon after the
capture of the two soldiers and they blew up the first Israeli Merkava tank
when it was only 35 feet inside the country. All four Israeli crewmen were
killed and the Israeli army moved no further forward. The long-range
Iranian-made missiles which later exploded on Haifa had been preceded only
a few weeks ago by a pilotless Hizbollah drone aircraft which surveyed
northern Israel and then returned to land in eastern Lebanon after taking
photographs during its flight. These pictures not only suggested a flight
path for Hizbollah’s rockets to Haifa; they also identified Israel’s
top-secret military air traffic control centre in Miron.

The next attack - concealed by Israel’s censors - was directed at this
facility. Codenamed “Apollo”, Israeli military scientists work deep inside
mountain caves and bunkers at Miron, guarded by watchtowers, guard-dogs and
barbed wire, watching all air traffic moving in and out of Beirut, Damascus,
Amman and other Arab cities. The mountain is surmounted by clusters of
antennae which Hizbollah quickly identified as a military tracking centre.
Before they fired rockets at Haifa, they therefore sent a cluster of
missiles towards Miron. The caves are untouchable but the targeting of such
a secret location by Hizbollah deeply shocked Israel’s military planners.
The “centre of world terror” - or whatever they imagine Lebanon to be -
could not only breach their frontier and capture their soldiers but attack
the nerve-centre of the Israeli northern military command.

Then came the Haifa missiles and the attack on the gunboat. It is now clear
that this successful military operation - so contemptuous of their enemy
were the Israelis that although their warship was equipped with cannon and
a Vulcan machine gun, they didn’t even provide the vessel with an
anti-missile capability - was also planned months ago. Once the Hetz-class
boats appeared, Hizbollah positioned a missile crew on the coast of west
Beirut not far from Jnah, a crew trained over many weeks for just such an
attack. It took less than 30 seconds for the Iranian-made missile to leave
Beirut and hit the vessel square amidships, setting it on fire and killing
the sailors.

Ironically, the Israelis themselves had invited journalists on an “embedded”
trip with their navy only hours earlier - they were allowed to film the
ships’ guns firing on Lebanon - and the moment Hizbollah hit the warship on
Friday, Hizbollah’s television station, Al-Manar, began showing the
“embedded” film. It was a slick piece of propaganda.

The Israelis were yesterday trumpeting the fact that the missile was made in
Iran as proof of Iran’s involvement in the Lebanon war. This was odd
reasoning. Since almost all the missiles used to kill the civilians of
Lebanon over the past four days were made in Seattle, Duluth and Miami in
the United States, their use already suggests to millions of Lebanese that
America is behind the bombardment of their country.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Article 3:

If our Prime Minister is crying, what are we to do?'

By Robert Fisk in Beirut:

07/17/06 "The Independent" -- -- You could see the Israeli missiles coming
through the clouds of smoke, hurtling like thunderbolts into the apartment
blocks of Ghobeiri, the crack of the explosions so loud that my ears are
still singing hours later as I write this report.

Yes, I suppose you could call this a "terrorist" target, for here in these
mean, fearful streets is - or rather was - the Hizbollah headquarters. Even
the movement's propaganda television station, Al-Manar, lay a pancaked ruin
in the street, its broadcasts still being transmitted from the station's
bunker beneath the rubble. But what of the tens of thousands of people who
live here?

The few who were not lying in their basements ran shrieking through the
streets - not gunmen, but women with screaming children, families holding
suitcases, desperate to leave the heaps of broken buildings, entire
apartment blocks smashed to bits, the roadways covered in smashed balconies
and torn electrical wires. "You don't have to help the resistance," Sayed
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, told the Lebanese on television
last night. "The resistance is on the front line and the Lebanese are
behind them."

Untrue, of course. It is the Lebanese - and their 140 dead, almost all
civilians - who are also on the front line. In Israel, 24 have been killed,
15 of them civilians. So the exchange rate for death in this filthy war is
now approximately one Israeli to five Lebanese. So many Lebanese have now
fled Beirut for Tripoli in the north of Lebanon, or for the Bekaa Valley in
the east - or to Syria - that Beirut, where one and a half million people
live, is a ghost city, its remaining residents sitting in their homes amid
the hopelessness of all those who believed that this country was at last
emerging from the shadows of its 15-year civil war. It was Nasrallah who
said that there are "more surprises to come", and the Lebanese fear that
the Israelis, too, have some more surprises for them.

I watched one of these from my sea-front balcony at dusk on Saturday, an
American-made Apache helicopter turning three times over the Mediterranean
before firing a single missile - perfectly visible, with smoke pouring from
the tail - that smacked into Beirut's brand new lighthouse on the Corniche
in a cloud of brown muck. So what was this for? Another "terrorist" target,
I suppose. Like the gas stations bombed in the Bekaa Valley. Like the convoy
of 20 civilians incinerated in an Israeli air-raid on Saturday after being
ordered - by the Israelis themselves - to leave their home village on the
border.

Last night, Hizbollah's missiles - after killing 10 Israelis in Haifa - were
falling on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, setting the forests alight,
and on the Israeli city of Acre. The Syrians warned of an "unlimited"
response if Israel attacked them - the Israelis have been saying,
untruthfully, that Syrian troops and Iranians are present in Lebanon,
helping Hizbollah in their battle - and the preposterous response of the G8
summit was greeted with despair. Tony Blair, who is now also, it seems, the
Minister of Root Causes, believes Syria and Iran are behind the original
Hizbollah attack. He is right. But it is to Damascus that the West will
have to go to switch this dirty war off.

Certainly, the powerless Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, cannot do
so. With his government accused by Israel of responsibility for Wednesday's
capture of two Israeli soldiers - a claim as preposterous as it is wrong -
he went on television in tears to appeal to the United Nations to arrange a
ceasefire for his "disaster-stricken nation". The Lebanese appreciated the
tears, but those tears are unlikely to have had President Bush shaking in
his boots. Churchill in 1940, Siniora - a sincere and good man, uncorrupted
by Lebanese politics - is not. "If our Prime Minister is crying," one
Lebanese woman astutely pointed out to me yesterday, " what is the civilian
population of our country supposed to do?"

But where are the other supposed political titans of Lebanon? What is Saad
Hariri, son of the assassinated ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri - who
rebuilt the Lebanon which Israel is now destroying - doing in Kuwait,
chatting to the Kuwaitis about his country's predicament? The Kuwaiti army
is scarcely going to come to defend Lebanon. Why isn't Hariri the son on
his private jet to the G8 summit in St Petersburg to demand of President
Bush that he protect the democratically-elected government and the nation
he praised for its "cedar revolution" last year? Or doesn't democracy
matter when Israel is smashing Lebanon? Answer: no, it doesn't.

UN Security Council Resolution 1559 demanded a Syrian retreat from Lebanon -
which was accomplished - but it also demanded the disarming of Hizbollah,
which was definitely not accomplished. Many here suspected that 1559,
designed by the French and the Americans, was intended to weaken Lebanon
and prepare it for a peace treaty with Israel. Well, not any more. It was
the Lebanese President, Emile Lahoud, who still cravenly follows Syria's
line - he is, after all, Syria's man - who said yesterday that Lebanon
"will never surrender". Lahoud as Churchill. There is something obscene
here.

Nasrallah, meanwhile, told the Israelis that: "If you do not want to play by
rules, we can do the same." It was a grim little threat that was obviously
meant to counter Ehud Olmert's equally grim little threat that there would
be "far-reaching consequences" for the missile attack on Haifa. Nasrallah's
televised argument - that Hizbollah originally wished to confine all
casualties to the military - will not wash with Israel, but may encourage
those many Lebanese who were originally outraged by Hizbollah's attack
across the border on Wednesday, only to be silenced by the cruelty of
Israel's response.

"This is the last struggle of the 'umma'," Nasrallah said, the " umma" being
the Arab "homeland". Alas, that is what the Arab leaders said when they
joined Lawrence of Arabia's battle against the Ottoman empire in the First
World War. It is always the "last struggle" .

The weapons of war

Fajr-3 missile

An Iranian-built rocket with range of 45km which can carry a 45kg warhead.
Israel accused Hizbollah of firing 240mm Fajr-3 missiles against Haifa.
Iran denies supplying the missiles to Hizbollah

Fajr-5 rocket

Longer-range version of Fajr-3 that can strike targets up to 72km away

Raad missile

Iranian-built missile with range of 120km. Could reach central Israel.
Israelis accused Hizbollah of firing Raad ("Thunder") missiles yesterday.
Hizbollah said last week it had fired Raad for the first time

Katyusha

Previously the Hizbollah missile of choice, the Russian-designed Katyushas
have a range of 22km and variable accuracy. Israel accused Syria of
supplying Hizbollah with a longer-range model

Kassem

Rockets with range of up to 10km, used by Hamas guerrillas in
Palestinian-ruled Gaza. Israeli town of Sderot has been a frequent target
of the notoriously inaccurate missiles

F-16 fighter

The US-made "fighting Falcon" is a multi-role fighter which has been
dropping quarter-ton bombs on targets in Lebanon

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited



Quoting Abdallah Jabbour <abdallah.jabbour at gmail.com>:

> Would anybody who has membership in the Independent be willing to do some
> copying and pasting for the rest of us?
>
> There are a couple of interesting, unbiased articles by Robert Fisk that
> are
> seemimgly worth reading. The latest is here:
> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1181622.ece, and there
> are
> links to others at the bottom of the page.
>
> Abdallah
>