Control of the House

"The signs now point to the most likely outcome of Democrats gaining control of the House," said Robert Erikson, a Columbia University political science professor.

Democrats need to gain 15 seats in the House to seize control after a dozen years of Republican rule, and the party is optimistic about its chances amid diminishing support for Bush and the GOP-led Congress.

Republicans argue that elections will be decided in the 435 districts and the 33 Senate races based on local issues with the power of incumbency looming large.

"This election will be less about a political climate that is challenging for both parties, and instead about the actual candidates and how their policies impact voters on the local level," said Tracey Schmitt, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman.

But fewer than 100 days before the Nov. 7 election, the AP-Ipsos poll suggested the midterms are clearly turning into a national referendum on Bush.

Protest vote

The number of voters who say their congressional vote this fall will be in part to express opposition to the president jumped from 20 percent last month to 29 percent, driven by double-digit increases among males, minorities, moderate and conservative Democrats and Northeasterners.

"I don't feel like the war was the answer," said Paula Lohler, 54, an independent from Worcester, Mass., who is inclined to vote her opposition to Bush. "It seems like it's going on and on and on and nothing's being done."

That attitude propelled anti-war challenger Ned Lamont to Tuesday's Democratic primary win over Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a stalwart supporter of Bush on the war.

Trouble in the South

"I think it's going to be similar to what we saw in 1994 and the tremendous dissatisfaction with Democrats," said Dick Harpootlian, the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. "Republicans are going to feel the wrath, feel the pain of being associated with President Bush."

In the South, Bush's approval ratings dropped from 43 percent last month to 34 percent as the GOP advantage with Southern women disappeared.

House Republican candidates looking to oust incumbent Democrats seized on the silver lining of the AP-Ipsos poll. Many of the 1,001 adults and 871 registered voters surveyed Aug. 7-9 said they've had enough with the status quo. Only 26 percent of adults said the country was on the right track, and just 29 percent approved of the job Congress is doing.

"It's a good year to be running against an incumbent," said Republican David McSweeney, an investment banker looking to unseat first-term Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean in the Chicago suburbs.

"Approval ratings for Congress are below where the president is," said Jeff Lamberti, a Republican taking on five-term Iowa Rep. Leonard Boswell. "It's a real opportunity for a challenger."

Democrats hopeful

A Democrat seeking an open seat in a competitive Colorado district - Ed Perlmutter - is certain his party will capitalize on the national mood.

"There's a point where people just get mad," said Perlmutter, a winner in Tuesday's primary.

On the generic question of whether voters would back the Democrat or Republican, 55 percent of registered voters chose the Democrat and 37 percent chose the Republican, a slight increase for Democrats from last month.

"I'm not too happy with Bush at the moment," said dental lab employee Chrissie Clement, 36, of Poynette, Wis. "I think he could do more for this country. We need to get somebody new in there and get a different party in charge."

Charles Taylor, 56, who works on newspaper presses and lives near Roanoke, Va., said, "I would like to see Republicans keep control of Congress. I vote Republican to support the president."

Republican consultant Kevin Spillane said August polls typically have been filled with bad news for Bush and the GOP, but they eventually turn it around in November. Still, he said, "The bottom line from the numbers is no Republican incumbent should be caught unprepared for November."

The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for adults and 3.5 percentage points for registered voters.

"During the era that ... living in a city was perfection, I was born in a poor family in a remote village," he wrote in a blog dated Friday, after opening with Islamic greetings.

His origins as the son of "a hard-bitten toiler blacksmith" may have been humble, but he says he excelled at school where he said he came 132nd out of 400,000 in exams to enter university.

As well as promising a better life to the poor, Ahmadinejad has sought to bolster support by refusing to bow to what he says is Western pressure to stop Iran's civilian nuclear program. The West says Iran is building an atomic bomb.

His defiance in the stand-off with the West has often played well in the Muslim world, where many are angered by U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Analyst Saeed Laylaz said the site -- available in Persian, Arabic, English and French at www.ahmadinejad.ir -- may be seeking to win support from abroad.

"Do you think that the U.S. and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another world war?" the president asks visitors to the site, offering them the choice to vote 'yes' or 'no'. [...]

Dr. Khalil A. Katato of West Bloomfield, Mich., an oncologist who came to Washington by bus with his wife and five children, said, "We are protesting U.S. support of Israeli aggression on the Palestinian and Lebanese people."

His wife, Daad Katato, said she made the trip to protest the war in Iraq, and to show sympathy for children killed or injured during Israel's military operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

The criticism of Israel at Saturday's rally contrasted with the sentiment in Congress, where support for Israel is overwhelming and bipartisan. By a vote of 410 to 8, the House last month expressed "strong support" for Israel and condemned Hezbollah and Hamas for armed attacks on Israeli territory. The Senate approved a similar resolution by voice vote.

President Bush was at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., winding up a 10-day vacation. He was due back at the White House on Sunday.

At the rally on Saturday, the prevailing sentiments were expressed in signs held aloft by marchers: "Occupation is a crime - Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine." "Stop Israeli terrorism." "No justice, no peace."

Brian Becker, national coordinator of a coalition called Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, a sponsor of the rally, asserted that President Bush had given Israel a green light to crush Hezbollah in Lebanon, then "sent cluster bombs to the Israeli Defense Forces to kill Lebanese children." Israel has asked the Bush administration to speed delivery of rockets armed with cluster munitions, which could be used to strike Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon, and a senior American official said this week that the request was likely to be approved.

Several speakers at the rally criticized Mr. Bush for mentioning the religious background of those arrested this week in a plot to blow up airplanes flying from Britain to the United States. Mr. Bush said the plot showed that "this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation."

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, said Mr. Bush owed Muslims an apology. "There is no Islamic fascism," Mr. Bray said. "There is no doctrine of fascism in Islam."

Esam Omesh, president of the Muslim American Society, said, "We all stand united against the violence and the killing in the holy land."

Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, drew cheers when he said, "We have a solemn obligation to impeach President Bush." Mr. Clark, who has served on the defense team for Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, also advocated the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Two students from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. - Ali Khan, 28, a Pakistani-American, and his wife, Afnan Khan, 22, who was born in the United States to Iraqi parents - were less strident. They said they were protesting the death of civilians, especially Lebanese children.

"They are all innocent," Mr. Khan said.

The anti-war demonstration is to continue through Sept. 3, although Bush's 10-day ranch vacation is to end Sunday.

Sheehan returned to Texas on Friday after a few days in Seattle at the Veterans for Peace convention. She planned to resume the war protest she started Aug. 6, the first anniversary of the beginning of her 26-day peace vigil that drew thousands of anti-war demonstrators and spurred counter demonstrations by Bush supporters.

Instead, friends took her from the airport to the hospital. After being on a liquid diet as part of the nationwide "Troops Home Fast" hunger strike, Sheehan had been treated at a Seattle emergency room Thursday, and ate for the first time in about 37 days, said her spokeswoman Tiffany Burns.

Doctors in Waco stopped uterine bleeding, gave her a blood transfusion and planned a biopsy, she said. Sheehan was dehydrated again Friday, but said it was probably from the bleeding.

Sheehan paid for a 5-acre lot about 7 miles from Bush's ranch last month so protesters would have a place to gather while the president is at his ranch. Last year, she started out camped in ditches along the road leading to Bush's ranch, until county officials banned roadside parking and camping. A sympathetic landowner then let the group gather on his 1-acre lot near the ranch.

The Israeli action, current and former government officials told Hersh, chimed with the Bush administration's desire to reduce the threat of possible Hizbullah retaliation against Israel should the US launch a military strike against Iran.

"A successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign ... could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations," sources told Hersh.

Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel's attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran."

An unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh: "It was our intention to have Hizbullah diminished and now we have someone else doing it."

Officials from the state department and the Pentagon denied the report. A spokesman for the National Security Council told Hersh that "The Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack."

Hersh has a track record in breaking major stories. He was the first to write about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and has written extensively about the build-up to the war in Iraq. He made his name when he uncovered the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war. Most recently he has written about US plans for Iran, alleging that US special forces had already been active inside the country.

"Hezbollah can only be destroyed by a ground campaign," wrote National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg early in the campaign. "If Israel doesn't launch one, it will be worse off."

Still others attacked him for failing to widen the war beyond Lebanon to Hezbollah supporters, Iran and Syria.

"(While) Iran may be too far away for much Israeli retaliation beyond a single strike on its nuclear weapons complex," wrote Max Boot, a Council of Foreign Relations fellow, in the Los Angeles Times, "...Syria is weak and next door. To secure its borders, Israel needs to hit the (President Bashir) Assad regime."

He was joined by in that appeal by Meyrav Wurmser, director of the neo-conservative Hudson Institute Centre for Middle East Policy and, significantly, the Israeli-born spouse of David Wurmser, a top Middle East adviser of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The bottom line is that Israel's gripe is not with Lebanon; it (is) with Syria and Iran," she wrote in National Review Online (NRO). "Given the explosive nature of the situation, Israel ought not let its adversaries define the battleground. Rather, it ought to carry the battle to them."

These public attacks are widely believed to reflect the positions of hard-line neo-conservatives within the administration of President George W. Bush, centred, in particular, in Cheney's office and that of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld.

They have largely been confined, however, to the more extreme elements in the neo-conservative movement, particularly those most closely associated with the right wing of Israel's opposition Likud Party.

With the exception of Krauthammer, they have strongly opposed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement from Gaza and have been using the ongoing crisis there, as well as the war in Lebanon, to discredit Olmert's "convergence" strategy -- his plan to dismantle many Jewish settlements in all but about 10 percent of the occupied West Bank.

More pragmatic neo-conservatives, such as those clustered around Weekly Standard editor William Kristol (who, however, called in the early days of the war for a quick U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities), have generally refrained from second-guessing Olmert's leadership and the conduct of the war.

Instead, they have focused on framing Israel's war against Hezbollah as part and parcel of Washington's larger "global war on terror". They have discouraged any suggestion that Washington seek to restrain Israel in its conduct of the war or impose a premature ceasefire, and have assailed "realist" and State Department proposals to directly engage Syria and Iran in efforts to stop the fighting or at least de-escalate the crises in which Israel finds itself as "appeasement".

Even these positions, however, have not been entirely appreciated by Olmert's government, according to Nir. He told the Voice of America (VOA) last week that he had "ascertained for a fact" that Israel had asked the Bush administration to use its influence with the Syrian government to gain the release of the three soldiers abducted by Hamas and Hezbollah, but that Washington -- no doubt as a result of internal neo-conservative influence -- had declined to do so. It was "quite a disappointment for Israel," he said.

Of the hard-line criticisms of Olmert, the most controversial has been the charge that, by failing to prosecute the war more vigorously, his government was undermining the administration's confidence in Israel as an effective ally in the war on terror.

Because of Hezbollah's strategic importance to Iran, "America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat," wrote Krauthammer in his Aug. 4 column, which noted that the existence of a "fierce debate in the United States about whether, in the post-Sep. 11 world, Israel is a net asset or liability."

"Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on Jul. 12 provided Israel the extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate its utility by making a major contribution to America's war on terrorism," but Olmert's "unsteady and uncertain leadership" had put that in question.

"The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win... It has counted on Israel's ability to do the job. It has been disappointed," according to Krauthammer, who is known to be a favourite of Cheney.

Although Krauthammer's message was particularly crude, it was echoed in part by hard-line neo-conservative editorial writers in both the National Review and the Wall Street Journal, which repeatedly called for Olmert to take stronger action more quickly lest, as the Journal put it, "President Bush's entire vision for the Middle East ...suffer a severe setback."

"Let's face it: Nobody likes a pushover; nobody likes a weakling," Ariel Cohen, a neo-conservative at the Heritage Foundation, told Nir. "This is something Olmert and (Defence Minister Amir) Peretz have to think about: how Israel is perceived not only in Europe and the Arab world, but also in the United States."

These criticisms have provoked outrage from some quarters, particularly among mainstream leaders in the U.S. Jewish community.

Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward that it was "inappropriate" for non-Israelis "who don't take the consequences of their advice, especially when it comes to issues of life and death, to become backstage generals, sitting in Washington or in New York, trying to manage Israel's war."

"(Krauthammer) is one of those armchair General Pattons who rarely, if ever, indicates that he feels pain about the loss of soldiers whether in Lebanon, Iraq, or anywhere else," noted M.J. Rosenberg, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), who strongly favours diplomatic efforts -- including with Syria -- to end the fighting.

"Some on the right would rather blame Israel for its hesitation about fighting than consider how much better off Israel if it didn't have to fight at all," he wrote in his weekly newsletter.

One pointer to a shift in the tactical balance is the comparative casualty counts. According to the Associated Press, as of this writing Lebanese dead total at least 642, of whom 558 are civilians, 29 Lebanese soldiers (who, at least officially, are not in the fight) and only 55 Hezbollah fighters. So Israel, with its American-style hi-tech "precision weaponry," has killed ten times as many innocents as enemies. In contrast, of 97 Israeli dead, 61 are soldiers and only 36 civilians, despite the fact that Hezbollah's rockets are anything but precise (think Congreves). Israel can hit anything it can target, but against a Fourth Generation enemy, it can target very little. The result not only points to a battlefield change of some significance, it also raises the question of who is the real "terrorist." Terror bombing by aircraft is still terror.

Understandably, these events keep Americans focused on the places where the fighting is taking place. But more important developments may be occurring on the flanks, largely unnoticed. An analysis piece in the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer by Sally Buzbee of AP notes:

Anger toward America is high, extremists are on the upswing, and hopes for democracy in the Middle East lie dashed....

"America, we hate you more than ever," Ammar Ali Hassan wrote in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, in the kind of visceral, slap-in-the-face rhetoric boiling across the region...."

Even many Arab reformers now believe the United States cares more about supporting Israel than anything else, including democracy.

Egypt is one of the three centers of gravity of America's position in the Middle East, the others being Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. An article by Michael Slackman in the Sunday New York Times suggests that Egyptians' anger is turning on their own government:

For decades, the Arab-Israeli conflict provided presidents, kings, emirs and dictators of the region with a safety valve for public frustration....

That valve no longer appears to be working in Egypt....

"The regular man on the street is beginning to connect everything together, said Mr. (Kamal) Khalil, the director of the Center for Socialist Studies in Cairo. "The regime impairing his livelihood is the same regime that is oppressing his freedom and the same regime that is colluding with Zionism and American hegemony."

Today, in an interview with the BBC, Jordan's King Abdullah warned that the map of the Middle East is becoming unrecognizable and its future appears "dim."

Washington, which in its hubris ignores both its friends and its enemies, refusing to talk to the latter or listen to the former, does not grasp that if the flanks collapse, it is the end of our adventures in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also, in a slightly longer time frame, the end of Israel. No Crusader state survives forever, and in the long term Israel's existence depends on arriving at some sort of modus vivendi with the region. The replacement of Mubarak, King Abdullah and the House of Saud with the Moslem Brotherhood would make that possibility fade.

To the region, America's apparently unconditional and unbounded support for Israel and its occupation of Iraq are part of the same picture. For a military historian, the question arises: will history see Iraq as America's Stalingrad? If we kick the analogy up a couple of levels, to the strategic and grand strategic, there are parallels. Both the German and the American armies were able largely to take, but not hold, the objective. Both had too few troops. Both Berlin and Washington underestimated their enemy's ability to counter-attack. Both committed resources they needed elsewhere and could not replace to a strategically unimportant objective. Finally, both entrusted their flanks to weak allies - and to luck.

Let us hope that, unlike von Paulus, our commanders know when to get out, regardless of orders from a leader who will not recognize reality.

August 12, 2006

William Lind [send him mail] is an analyst based in Washington, DC.

Copyright © 2006 William S. Lind

Odeh said the men were buying the phones to sell to a man in Dallas for a profit of about $5 per phone. She said they were in Michigan because so many people in the Dallas area are doing the same thing that the phones are often sold out.

Odeh said she thought her husband and her relatives were targeted because of their Arab descent. The men's families come from Jerusalem, she said.

The men were stopped early Friday about 80 miles north of Detroit after purchasing 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart. Police said they found about 1,000 phones in their minivan. The men were arrested Friday afternoon.

No pleas were entered at the arraignment Saturday at a District Court in Caro. A magistrate set bond at $750,000 apiece and the men were being held at the Tuscola County Jail, police said.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Muhareb told the magistrate: "This is a misunderstanding." He said he was selling the phones to earn money to help pay for his brother's college education.

Tuscola County Prosecutor Mark E. Reene told The Saginaw News in Michigan that investigators believe the men were targeting the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas. He declined to say what led investigators to that belief.

Reene and the FBI did not return phone messages Saturday from The Associated Press.

Odeh said the family is working to get an attorney for the men.

"I just want everyone to know that they're innocent and they shouldn't be locked up in jail without any evidence," she said.

Her husband is a college student and they have a 2-month-old baby, Odeh said.

A pretrial hearing has been set for Friday and a preliminary exam for Aug. 24.

The arrests in Michigan came three days after two men were arrested in Marietta, Ohio, where police said they aroused suspicions when they acknowledged buying about 600 phones in recent months at stores in southeast Ohio.

Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, both 20 and from the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, have been charged with two felonies - money laundering in support of terrorism and soliciting or providing support for acts of terrorism - and misdemeanor falsification. A preliminary hearing on the felony counts was set for Tuesday.

Defense lawyers said Houssaiky and Abulhassan planned to resell the phones simply to make money. They say the men were targeted only because they are of Arab descent.

What I have argued instead is twofold. First, we cannot easily know what Hizbullah is trying to hit because Israel has located most of its army camps, weapons factories and military installations near or inside civilian communities. If a Hizbullah rocket slams into an Israeli town with a weapons factory, should we count that as an attack on civilians or on a military site?

The claim being made against Hizbullah in Lebanon -- that it is "cowardly blending" with civilians, according to the UN's Jan Egeland -- can, in truth, be made far more convincingly of the Israeli army. While there has been little convincing evidence that Hizbullah is firing its rocket from towns and villages in south Lebanon, or that its fighters are hiding there among civilians, it can be known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israeli army camps and military installations are based in northern Israeli communities.

An obvious point that no one seems to be making -- and given a news blackout that lasted several hours, Israel clearly hoped no one would make -- is that the 12 soldiers who were killed on Sunday in Kfar Giladi by a Hizbullah rocket were, under Egeland's definition, "cowardly blending" with the civilian population of that community. We know there are still civilians in Giladi because their response to the rocket barrage was quoted in the Israeli media.

My second claim was that Israel's military censor is preventing foreign journalists based in Israel, myself included, from discussing where Hizbullah rockets are landing, and what they may be aimed at. Under the censorship rules, It is impossible to mention any issue that touches on Israeli security or defense matters: the location of military installations, for example, cannot be divulged. It is arguable whether it would actually be possible to report a Hizbullah strike that hit a military site inside Israel.

I therefore have to tread carefully in what I say next, relying on information that is already publicly available, but which at least challenges the simplistic view that Hizbullah is firing rockets either indiscriminately or willfully to kill civilians. I draw on two pieces of coverage provided by BBC World.

On Tuesday, the BBC's Katya Adler reported from the northern community of Kiryat Shmona, which has taken the heaviest pounding from Hizbullah rockets and from which many of the local residents have fled over the past month. As she stood on a central street describing the difficult conditions under which the remaining families were living, she had to shout over the rythmic bark of what sounded like an Israeli tank close by firing into Lebanon. She made no mention of what was doing the firing -- and given the censorship laws, my assumption is she cannot. But it does raise the question of how much of a civilian target Kiryat Shmona really is.

Consider also this. Throughout the four weeks of fighting, the BBC have had a presenter and film crew at the top of an area of Haifa known as the Panorama, above the beautiful Bahia Gardens. As the name suggests, from there the film crew have had an unrestricted view of the port and docks below and the wide arc of heavily developed shoreline that stretches up to Acre.

The spot where the BBC presenters have been standing, telling us regularly that they can hear the wail of sirens warning Haifa's residents to head for the shelters, is in the centre of this sprawling ridge-top city, in one of the most heavily built up and inhabited areas of Haifa. So why have the BBC's presenters been standing there calmly every day for weeks under the barrage of rockets?

Because all the evidence suggests that Hizbullah has not been trying to hit the centre of Haifa, where it would be certain of inflicting high casualties, whether its rockets were on target or slightly adrift. Instead, as BBC presenters have repeatedly shown us, the overwhelming majority of rockets land either in the mostly-abandoned port area or fall short into the bay -- and on the odd occasion travel a little too far, as one did on Sunday landing on an Arab neighbourhood near the port and killing two inhabitants.

If Hizbullah's primary goal is to kill as many civilians as possible in Haifa, it seems to be going about it in a very strange manner indeed -- unless we are to believe that none of its rockets could be fired the extra 1km needed to hit central Haifa. Instead, as is clear from the view shown by BBC cameras, the port includes many sites far more "strategic" than the roads, bridges, milk factories and power stations Israel is destroying in Lebanon: it has the oil refinery, the naval docks and other installations that, yes, I cannot mention because of the censorship laws.

At the very least, we should concede to Hizbullah that it is not always targeting civilians, and very possibly is not mainly targeting civilians, which might in part explain the comparatively low Israeli civilian casualty figures.

That said, there are two valid criticisms, both made by Human Rights Watch, of Hizbullah's rocket fire -- though exactly the same or worse criticisms can be made of the Israeli army. Those, unlike HRW, who single out Hizbullah are being either disingenuous or hypocritical. One is that Hizbullah has filled many of its rockets with ballbearings. Most critics of Hizbullah take this as conclusive proof that the group's only intent is to kill and injure civilians. Anyone who has seen the damage done by a katyusha rocket will realise that it is not a very powerful weapon: it essentially punches a hole in whatever it hits. The biggest danger is from the shrapnel and from anything added -- like ballbearings -- that spray out on impact. The shrapnel can kill civilians nearby, of course, but it can also kill soldiers -- as we saw at Kfar Giladi -- and can puncture tanks containing flammable liquids like petrol, causing explosions.

The damage inflicted by the ballbearings is not in itself proof that Hizbullah is trying to kill Israeli civilians, any more than Israel's use of far more lethal cluster bombs is proof that it wants to kill Lebanese civilians. Both are acting according to the gruesome realities of war: they want to inflict as much damage as possible with each rocket strike. That is deplorable, but so is war.

The second criticism made by HRW is that because Hizbullah's rockets are rudimentary and lack sophisticated guidance systems they are as good as indiscriminate. That conclusion is wrong both logically and semantically. As I have tried to show, the rockets are mostly not indiscriminate (though presumably some misfire, as do Israeli missiles); rather, they are not precise.

This, according to Human Rights Watch, still makes Hizbullah's rocket attacks war cimes. That may be true, but it of course also means Israel's missile strikes and bombardment of Lebanon are war crimes on the same or a greater scale. Hizbullah's strikes against civilians may be intentional or they may be the result of inaccurate guidance systems trying to hit military targets. Israel's strikes against civilians are either intentional or the result of accurate guidance systems and very faulty, to the point of reckless, military intelligence.

Finally, what about the defense offered by Israel's supporters that its air force tries to avoid harming Lebanese civilians by leafletting them before an attack to warn them that they must leave? The argument's thrust is that only those who belong to Hizbullah or give it succor remain behind in south Lebanon and they are therefore legitimate targets. (It ignores, of course, hundreds of civilians killed in areas that have not been leafletted or who were trying to flee, as ordered, when hit by an Israeli missile. )

Hizbullah, of course, has done precisely the same. In speeches, its leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly warned Israeli residents of areas like Haifa, Afula, Hadera and Tel Aviv that Hizbullah will hit these cities with rockets days before it has actually done so. Hizbullah can claim just as fairly that it has given Israelis fair warning of its attacks on civilian communities, and that any who remain have only themselves to blame.

This debate is important because it will determine in the coming months and years who will be blamed by the international community -- and future historians -- for committing war crimes. Hizbullah deserves as fair a hearing as Israel, though at the moment it most certainly is not getting it.

Like every army in a war, Hizbullah may not acting in a humane manner. But it is demonstrably acting according to the same standards as the Israeli army -- and possibly, given Israel's siting of military targets in civilian areas, higher ones. The fact that the contrary view is almost universally held betrays our prejudices rather than anything about Hizbullah's acts.

-Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: the Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net