Israel's Attack on Lebanon and Hezbollah

[nicky g]

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Hezbollah is nothing but a proxy force for Iran and Syria.

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I don't agree. I don;t see how it could be a proxy force for both a theocratic Shi'i Islamist regime and a secular Baathist regime at the same time, even if they are aligned on some international issues. Certainly it receives some support from both regimes. But Hizballah came into being as a resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, aided but by no means formed by the Iranians. It is ideologically close to Khomeinist thinking and it receives some help from the Syrians. But it is no mor a purely proxy force than the Falange was a purely proxy force for Israel; it has its own base, popularity, local demands etc.

Your analysis is interesting and perhaps partly correct. But by dumb I meant more unjustified/going to lead to bad things for little gain/I disapprove of it (stick that in your pipe and smoke it, that, Hizb Allah)

[wacki]

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I don;t see how it could be a proxy force for both a theocratic Shi'i Islamist regime and a secular Baathist regime at the same time

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Ya, and those "holy" muslim terrorists never kill innocent muslims...... [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[TaintedRogue]

Post deleted by andyfox

[jokerthief]

It's common knowledge that Hezbollah gets it's funding and weapons from Iran and Syria. That means Iran and Syria have the power to influence what operations Hezbollah does and when they do it. Iran and Syria recently formed a cooperative diplomatic alliance after the US invaded Iraq. Both countries want to destabilize Israel and the US in the mideast. This conflict weakens the US and EU's ability to influence a democratic movement in Lebanon and to bring diplomatic pressure on Iran's nuclear program.

I'm not saying that Hezbollah doesn't have their own agenda. I'm saying that there are multiple games of chess going on in the middle east right now and we are currently seeing some pretty major moves.

[Autocratic]

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Lebanon purports to be a sovereign country

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I always wonder how people can support some of Israel's more extreme actions, and then I heard statements like this, which apparently suggests that sovereignty is based on how much a nation's policies agree with Israel's, and I don't wonder anymore.

[Fly]

I like this quote.

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I was summoned to see Ben-Gurion. It was the first time I met him, and right from the start Ben-Gurion said to me: "Let me first tell you one thing: it doesn't matter what the world says about Israel, it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive."


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon

[wacki]

niki g, Iran is mentioned many times in this article.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita.../hizballah.htm

Hezbollah was established by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who came to Lebanon during the 1982 "Peace for Galilee" war, as part of the policy of exporting the Islamic revolution. It receives substantial amounts of financial, training, weapons, explosives, political, diplomatic, and organizational aid from Iran and Syria.

Food for thought. I still have tons to learn on this matter.

[Exsubmariner]

Hold on to your hat.

This will give pretext to every nut with a suicide vest and a fundalmentalist programming. It's only the beginning. It goes down hill from here until somebody wins. My money is on Isreal.

[Autocratic]

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Hold on to your hat.

This will give pretext to every nut with a suicide vest and a fundalmentalist programming. It's only the beginning. It goes down hill from here until somebody wins. My money is on Isreal.

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If reckless Israeli aggression always brought about cataclysmic wars, we'd have had several in the past decade, so I wouldn't worry about it.

[Yuv]

Hizballah has lighten up a rather quite front with the killing of 8 Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of two more soldiers still in captivity in Lebanon.

The Israeli response is an attempt to restore the deterrence factor that kept that border quite for the past couple of years. Israel is only responding to attacks by Hizballah.

I do not agree with some of the policies my government had taken twords Gaza and the West Bank probably since 1967, but this is beside the point. This escalade in the Lebanon border is entirely Hizballah's (a terrorist organization that has taken control of Lebanon since it's so called independence from Syria) fault.

The two missiles fired at Haifa, the 3rd largest city in Israel which is 40 km's from the border, will probably result in Israeli forces shutting down all powers to Beirut and blacking out the Lebanon capital.

Very sad that the events took a turn like this, but while there are justify criticism of Israeli policies twords Gaza, there is seriously nothing Israel could have done differently in Lebanon and every other nation would have reacted in the same way.