Uncategorized

The eerie resonance of history

Posted on

Iraq 2003 may not be Lebanon 1982, nor certainly Suez, 1956. Still, it’s good to be reminded that there’s little truly new under the sun — the very sun that once refused to set on the British Empire. Both Jim Lobe of Asia Times and Robert Fisk of the Independent suggest past moments in the Middle East that should make anyone considering American plans to reshape the area today stop and think. Lobe, in particular, suggests that the Lebanese debacle of the early Age of Reagan offers an eerie analogy to the present moment, right down to the same dreams of “liberating” and remaking the Middle East in conjunction with the Likud Party and an Israel Army led by then defense minister Ariel Sharon (against, of course, Arafat’s PLO).

To some extent, this is less surprising than we might imagine, for on the American side too, the cast of characters — two decades later many retreads from the Reagan era — remains unnervingly familiar. You might think that polishing off ancient, doomed dreams from the Lebanese debacle might not be the best way to go today, or that our leaders might take the odd lesson or two from their own histories, but, it seems, no such luck. The least one might take away from a reconsideration of these two moments is the thought that in war, when it comes, the best dreamed plans almost invariably go awry. Tom

Iraq: The ghost of Lebanon past
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times
January 16, 2003

WASHINGTON – “What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon,” wrote Colin Powell, a major general in 1982, in his memoirs about Washington’s brief but disastrous sojourn in Lebanon 20 years ago, “was America sticking its hand into a thousand-year-old hornet’s nest.”

That memory undoubtedly fuels Powell’s determination to fight off hardliners in the administration of President George W Bush who are equally determined to attack and occupy Iraq, even without United Nations or allied support, if necessary.

As pointed out recently by military analyst William Arkin in the Los Angeles Times, what happened in Lebanon 20 years ago may tell us a lot about the hopes, fears and delusions of US policymakers about what could happen in Iraq.

To read more Lobe click here

WASHINGTON – “What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon,” wrote Colin Powell, a major general in 1982, in his memoirs about Washington’s brief but disastrous sojourn in Lebanon 20 years ago, “was America sticking its hand into a thousand-year-old hornet’s nest.”

That memory undoubtedly fuels Powell’s determination to fight off hardliners in the administration of President George W Bush who are equally determined to attack and occupy Iraq, even without United Nations or allied support, if necessary.

As pointed out recently by military analyst William Arkin in the Los Angeles Times, what happened in Lebanon 20 years ago may tell us a lot about the hopes, fears and delusions of US policymakers about what could happen in Iraq.

To read more Lobe click here

New crisis, old lessons
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
January 15, 2003

There was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt to use the United
Nations as a fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic British public,
journalists used as propagandists and our enemy – an Arab dictator
previously regarded as a friend of the West – compared to the worst
criminals of the Second World War. Sound familiar? Well, it happened
almost half a century ago, not over oil but over a narrow man-made canal
linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.

The Suez crisis has haunted British governments ever since 1956 – it
hung over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War, and its ghost
now moves between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, between Jack
Straw and Tony Blair. For Suez destroyed a British prime minister –
along, almost, with the Anglo-American alliance – and symbolised the end
of the British empire.

Robert Fisk is the author of Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (www.nationbooks.org).

To read more Fisk click here