Sunny Saturday with the Middle East at War –updated

UPDATE (11:00 a.m.): The headline is now U.S., France OK U.N. Mideast truce pact. I can't wait to hear the cluck-cluck-cluck of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. The French saved our bacon, and Israel's too on this one. …Let me also add that the idea of disarming Hezbollah is one thing, but to make this work the Hezbollah fighters need to be integrated into the Lebanese army, no easy task. Nothing else will work, because they must have a stake in the “new” Lebanon, which will also make the Siniora gov. stronger. As for Nasrallah, he isn't going anywhere. Oh, and one more thing, AMEN! TO THIS.

The draft, obtained by The Associated Press, “calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations.” (snip) One crucial element is an arms embargo that would block any entity except the Lebanese government from buying weapons. That is presumably meant to block the sale of arms to Hezbollah from Iran and Syria, believed to be the militia's main suppliers. Other principles spelled out in the resolution include the disarmament of Hezbollah; the creation of a buffer zone from the U.N.-demarcated border between Israel and Lebanon north to the Litani River; and the delineation of Lebanon's borders, especially in the disputed Chebaa Farms area. … AP

UPDATE II (1:30 p.m.): I've been going through some Stratfor information, via Sean-Paul, and came upon something very interesting. As an fyi, all power has been knocked out in the Kiraoun area at the southern end of the Bekaa Valley, but there's more. Cue show tunes: “Something's Comin'.”

… A week ago, Israeli foot patrols in Lebanon were spotted using llamas, an especially quiet beast of burden that can go several days without eating while carrying about as much weight as one Israeli soldier can carry. This, combined with an airstrike on a power station supplying an area of the southern Bekaa Valley, signals Israel is about to make a significant move. At first glance, it appears like an odd role-reversal when Israeli reconnaissance units are leading pack animals into battle while Hezbollah fighters are wielding modern anti-tank weapons. But as U.S. special operations forces calling in airstrikes from horseback in Afghanistan showed, mountain and fourth-generation warfare present new challenges that must be met on the ground. …

Israelis hit Lebanese Christian areas.

A strange thing happened on the way to Senator Chris Dodd helping his friend
Joe Lieberman yesterday. Appearing on “Hardball,” Dodd said he delayed
his trip to Iraq to help Joe save his flailing campaign. However, in the interview,
Dodd seemed more interested in saying the war was a disaster and we should pull
out now, than talking about Joe Lieberman. It was telling, especially when Dodd repeated over again that he disagreed with Lieberman on Iraq. Message sent
and received, Mr. Dodd, our message to you, that is.

Meanwhile, our Middle East policy is in shambles and even the RNC
is running from Bush. It's bad, people. But Paris all
over again? You remember the Paris peace talks to settle Vietnam, right?
Yeah, those talks. Same type of screw up, different war. But now even Israel is spinning from the realization that they may be faced with yet another Lebanese quagmire (h/t Billmon).

But if you want screw
ups, listen to this out of Iraq.

Is there any way to read this other than that some significant portion of the Iraqi media which emerged after Saddam's fall was in fact a fully funded and operational Psychological Operations campaign? If that's the case, then this would seem to quite a revelation. Which newspapers, radios and TV stations were actually PSYOP operations, one might want to know. While I'd imagine that most enterprising journalists are either in Lebanon or on vacation, this still might be worth somebody following up on. Information Operations: What Went Wrong?

The pdf on the Army's
IO is an incredible read. Phrases like “a commander must
visualize the information environment” pepper the report. It will
be years before we understand and weigh what we actually asked of our soldiers
in Iraq opposed to the duties they were actually trained to execute. Army leaders
found IO a “nebulous” concept. Well, no kidding. The U.S. Information
Operations in Iraq was nothing less than a total and complete fiasco. But remember
when we shut down Sadr's newspaper, which began the hell? We not only shut him
down, but we started up a huge mechanism that was devoted to PSYOPS, which isn't all that shocking, however none of it worked, or when it did it worked poorly. Read the report, but have a tall cold one handy.

Fast forward… Via Huffington Post,
the picture accompanying this
article just makes you want to scream. The text doesn't help either.

Israeli Prime Minister Olmert doing take no prisoner bombings in Lebanon while
we were barely hanging on in Iraq are not the actions of an ally. Taking into
account the civilian casualties the brutal barbarity is all the more stunning.
But it's Olmert's actions while Iraq was imploding that really ticks me off.
It's been very difficult for me to get my head around that one; especially with
Bush ignoring it like it doesn't matter. It's unfathomable. But now the Israelis are hitting the Christian areas of Lebanon.

Hezbollah's heinous terrorist acts in the past also doesn't excuse the slaughtering of
Lebanese civilians. It sure doesn't erase the reality that Hezbollah has seats
in the Lebanese government, won in a democratic election.

Memo to Bush and the conservatives: democracy is sometimes messy and unpredictable
(see Connecticut, though there hasn't been fisticuffs just yet).

But to hear our brave and valiant U.S. troops talk about Iraq, with no way
out for them, because our president would rather vacation in Crawford than hunker
down and find solutions for the imploding Middle East, well, dereliction of
duty about covers it. I honestly don't know how President Bush sleeps at night. That he's back in Crawford rubs salt in our soldiers wounds.

… “It's to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we've found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down – and if that's not a marker of a civil war, I don't know what is,” said Ramon, 33, of San Antonio, Texas. Driving back to his base, Johnson watched a long line of trucks and cars go by, packed with families fleeing their homes with everything they could carry: mattresses, clothes, furniture, and, in the back of some trucks, bricks to build another home. “Every morning that we head back to the patrol base, this is all we see,” Johnson said. “These are probably people who got threatened last night.” In Taji, an area north of Baghdad, where the roads between Sunni and Shiite villages have become killing fields, many soldiers said they saw little chance that things would get better. “I don't think there's any winning here. Victory for us is withdrawing,” said Sgt. James Ellis, 25, of Chicago. “In this part of the world they have been fighting for 3,000 years, and we're not going to fix it in three.” Iraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops say