World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

Washington deploys warships off the coast of Lebanon
By Bill Van Auken
1 March 2008

The Bush administration has ordered the deployment of US Navy
warships, including the guided missile destroyer USS Cole, off
the coast of Lebanon and Israel, escalating the threat of a wider
war in the Middle East.

The Cole, capable of striking targets throughout the region
with cruise missiles, is expected to be joined soon by the US
Navy’s Nassau battle group, which includes six vessels, including
amphibious landing craft, as well as a contingent of over 2,000
Marines.

The deployment constitutes a “show of support for regional
stability” because of “concern about the situation in
Lebanon,” a Pentagon official told Agence France-Press.

In reality this naked exercise in gunboat diplomacy can only
serve to increase tensions and make a regional war all the more
likely.

The immediate target of the military buildup appears to be
Syria and opposition political forces in Lebanon itself, particularly
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia mass movement that Washington has
branded as a terrorist organization.

The military action was joined Thursday by the Bush administration’s
announcement of another round of sanctions against Syria, this
time directed at four named individuals alleged to have played
a role in supporting the anti-occupation resistance in neighboring
Iraq.

“We don’t succumb to threats and military intimidation
practiced by the United States to implement its hegemony over
Lebanon,” said Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah, who
declared the naval deployment a direct threat to Lebanon’s
sovereignty. “This proves the confrontation is with decision-makers
in Washington,” he added.

Politicians linked to the US-backed government claimed that
Washington had ordered the deployment without any consultation
with Lebanese officials.

The US naval deployment coincided with yet another postponement
of a parliamentary vote to fill the office of the Lebanese president,
which has been vacant for the past four months. Washington is
anxious to consolidate a US-dominated regime in Lebanon around
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to further its broader aims of controlling
the region and its vital energy resources.

This week saw the 15th such postponement, derailing a mediation
attempt by Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa and making
the selection of a new president unlikely until after an Arab
summit scheduled in Damascus for March 29-30. King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia and some other Arab heads of state aligned with the
US-backed ruling coalition in Lebanon have indicated that they
will boycott the summit unless the political impasse is resolved
and a Lebanese president is in attendance.

Washington has cynically opposed any negotiated settlement,
instead seeking the installation of a regime committed to destroying
the political influence of Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah
and its political allies are determined to secure sufficient representation
in the government to give them effective veto power. The opposition
holds a sufficient number of seats in parliament to deny the ruling
parties a quorum, thus giving it the power to prevent the selection
of a president.

Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and a leading
opposition figure, charged the US with seeking to block any compromise.
In a television interview Friday, he said that the Bush administration
was particularly hostile to the Arab League initiative, which
called for a unity government and the enactment of a new electoral
law.

Washington and the March 14 coalition of pro-US government
parties have sought to pin the blame for the government crisis
on Syria, portraying it as an attempt by Damascus to extract revenge
for having been compelled to withdraw its troops from Lebanon
and cede power to pro-American politicians who succeeded in winning
a parliamentary majority in 2005.

But there are growing indications that the attempts by the
Bush administration to turn Lebanon into a key theater for prosecuting
its “global war on terrorism,” with Hezbollah, Syria
and Iran all as targets, are exacerbating deep-going social and
political tensions in Lebanon. The US strategy is threatening
to unravel the country’s frayed political power-sharing agreement
between Maronite Christian, Sunni and Shia political forces and
reignite the civil war that ravaged the country for 15 years beginning
in 1975.

Popular protests over social conditions by the country’s
predominantly working-class and poor Shia population have met
with increasing repression. Early last month, a protest against
power cuts in a Shia neighborhood in Beirut turned into a full-blown
confrontation with the army that left seven unarmed demonstrators
dead. The weeks since have seen repeated exchanges of gunfire
between rival militias affiliated to either government of opposition
parties.

Meanwhile, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a prominent member
of the ruling coalition, used a televised February 10 speech to
issue a bellicose challenge to the opposition: “You want
disorder? It will be welcomed. You want war? It will be welcomed.
We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles. We
will bring them to you.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal warned recently
that Lebanon was “on the verge of civil war.”

Washington has a long and bloody history of military intervention
in Lebanon’s internal affairs, having acted repeatedly to
bolster the political power of pro-Western parties and to suppress
opposition from the country’s oppressed.

In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower sent some 14,000 soldiers
and Marines into Lebanon to prop up the rightist regime of President
Camille Chamoun—who enjoyed financial backing from both the
CIA and the oil companies—against mounting opposition from
predominantly Muslim Arab nationalists.

Some 25 years later, US Marines were sent into Lebanon again
in the wake of the Israeli invasion of the country, only to be
withdrawn after the bombings of their Beirut barracks left 241
Marines and 58 French troops dead. Then, as now, US warships were
dispatched to the Lebanese coast, bombarding Shia and Druze villages.

The other broader context of the US naval deployment is the
mounting threat of renewed Israeli military offensives, both in
southern Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip. Israel has carried out
repeated air strikes against Gaza since Wednesday, killing at
least 35 Palestinians, including a six-month-old baby and four
children struck down as they were playing football.

The Israeli government said that the bombardment was a response
to the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. Meanwhile,
senior government officials have warned that an Israeli ground
invasion of Gaza is virtually inevitable.

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai employed the Hebrew word
for Holocaust to describe the retaliation that is being prepared.
He told the Israeli Army Radio Friday that the Palestinians would
“bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use
all our might to defend ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have also recently conducted war
games on the northern border with Lebanon in apparent preparation
for another war. In 2006, Israel launched a war against Lebanon,
including massive bombardments that left over 1,000 civilians
killed and much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins.

Nonetheless, the 34-day war was a defeat for Israel, leaving
Hezbollah strengthened. A report issued recently by an Israeli
commission formed to investigate the conduct of the war described
it as “a serious missed opportunity.”

The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may well seek
to reverse this failure with a new act of military aggression.
The recent “targeted assassination” of Hezbullah’s
senior military commander Imad Mugniyah in Damascus is widely
seen in the region as a deliberate Israeli provocation aimed at
provoking the Shia movement’s retaliation and thereby providing
the pretext for another Israeli war in Lebanon. Such a project
would almost certainly enjoy the backing of the Bush administration,
providing it with its own pretext for targeting Iran and Syria
as the supposed state sponsors of terrorism and instability in
the Middle East.

The dispatch to the eastern Mediterranean of the USS Cole,
a ship which has been identified with the US “war on terror”
since it was attacked by a suicide bomber in Yemen in 2000, losing
17 sailors, constitutes a stark warning that US imperialism is
preparing to follow up its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with
the unleashing of even greater armed terror against the peoples
of the region.

Copyright
1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved