Lebanese Bombing on Eve of the Jewish New Year

Today's bombing in Tripoli of a bus load of Lebanese troops would seem at first a slap in the face for General become President Michel Suleiman.  However, it comes also on the day that at sundown marks the start of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year: September 29, 2008.

One may wonder at the timing.

The blast, killing 5 and wounding 21, took place at about 9:30 a.m., Beirut time.

Writing for the Boston Globe, Hussein Dakroub relays the official description of the event:

"Security officials said the car packed with explosives was parked on the side of a road and detonated by remote control as the bus drove in the Bahsas neighborhood on the southern entrance to the northern port city of Tripoli.

They said the explosives used were mixed with ball bearings to maximize casualties."

It's rather lovely out there at the moment (4:20 p.m. in Beirut)--scattered clouds, about 81-deg. (F), winds around 8-mph. 

Sunset: 6:25 p.m.

This has been made a hard day for Lebanon and most likely by Hezbollah or some other hardline gang, and that perhaps as an act of revenge for last year's destruction of Fatah al-Islam.  In any case, the bomb was planted, the bus observed, and the explosives detonated by an observer.

For Israel, what could still turn out a long day has instead been made a sweet one through the IDF's determination to make it so:

"New recipes have been sent to army cooks on various IDF bases, rigid schedules are set in place for all army kitchens, and large quantities of food have been distributed to all army bases even in the most remote corners of the country."  (Moisa, Tal.  "Apples and Honey for a Sweet New Year."  Israel Defense Forces web, September 29, 2008: http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/News/today/2008n/09/2801.htm).

Last year at about this time, September 12, 2007, Syria had complained bitterly about an alleged Israeli incursion into its air space a week earlier.  In that imbroglio, AFP and CNN reporters, relying on "an unnamed Washington official", believed the mission expressive of Israeli pique with Syria-to-Hezbollah arms transfers and demonstrative as regards its air space reach.

Would that only water would pass under the proverbial bridge in the Middle East.  Instead, a year in and around Israel yields a crop of misfitting alterations in the political landscape.

On the positive side, businessmen under the influence of invisible doves investigated markets and partnerships with peers across the divides of the West Bank; on the negative: the most dreadful of prisoner swaps with a Hezbollah, up until today, perhaps, adjusted to the congenial new Lebanon, which had avoided civil war with the same earlier this year by letting the militants keep their surreptitious and secure fiber-optic, shadow cellular communications network in fit fiddle. 

Tech guru Chris Soghoian, noted the following about the militant's latest toy:

"Jamming cell phones is relatively easy, as it is simply a matter of sending out radio waves. Disrupting a fiber-optic network, on the other hand, is extremely difficult. The Israelis would need to locate the individual fiber-optic lines, and then cut them. To do that, they'd need boots on the ground, in control. This is not something that Israel, or even the central Lebanese government, can currently do."

Farther down in Soghoian's article, which takes a gander at the guerrilla's installation of the latest in high tech signal transmission, he relays a coined term, "glass roots" to describe "community-built fiber networks (credit a guy named "Doc Searls" for that one) and, for the context in southern Lebanon, Soghoian's own "fiber warfare".

(Soghoian provides a link to a detailed overview of Hezbollah's system: Stratfor. "Lebanon: Hezbollah's Communication Network." IntelliBriefs, May 9, 2008: http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2008/05/lebanon-hezbollahs-communication.html).

One hopes Michel Suleiman's Lebanon, which destroyed a small Islamist invasion force at Nahr al-Bared last year, which operation also pounded much of the Palestinian camp into rubble), will not find itself subject again and so soon to Hassan Nasrallah's Lebanon, which army may keep its ordnance and weapons hidden right up to the moment that it chooses to use them, nor another AQ-type invasion, which wasps have been flying out of their heavily damaged nests in Iraq.

Was 5768 a good year for Israel?  Will 5769 prove better?

I think it will prove better.

Running beneath the Islamic Small Wars are suppositions about how to frame the fighting: medieval vs. modern; "dead end kids" vs. the haves; Arabs vs. Jews; east vs. west; the "clash of civilizations"; etc. 

There's no end to that nonsense, but there is this for consideration: most of the involved Islamic states support well educated and internationally integrated business and military classes and leadership, making the kvetching about Jews and Israel (and Americans and Danish cartoonists, as I like to say) a revivalist's tent show for millions who have been, so far, less involved with the world beyond their ken.

That's going to end because the world through its aid missions and militaries will prove of necessity persistent in coming to them.

Both the communicating and the invested have also gone far in their transformation to the transnational, and while pandering to the parochial works in simple systems, Pakistan's struggles well demonstrate how  rifts grow deep where large, complex production and trade systems have taken hold.

Iran, for example, may persist in putting its balls on display every six to eighteen months or so (lately, by producing provocative incidents involving British or U.S. Navy operations), it has nonetheless to defend physically its own substantial industrial, cultural, and human assets.  Its sword has been a sharp tongue and its shield its income from oil and other trade.

The question then for the theocratic who have through talk and walk painted themselves into adversarial positions with much of the rest of the world is how to get out of it or how to get something out of it, the ample rewards of martyrdom notwithstanding.

As matters of culture and custom, the language possibility for that may not yet exist: many go off to Jihad with infinetly patient and equally inflexible voices echoing in their ears.

Would Mohhamed, pbuh, have anticipated so many clerics and warriors doing his speaking for him?

In fact, the Qur'an says of the Jews:

"There are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite God's revelations during the night, who bow down in worship, who believe in God and the Last Day, who order what is right and forbid what is wrong, who are quick to do good deeds.  These people are among the righteous and they will not be denied [the reward] for whatever good deeds they do: God knows exactly who is conscious of him." (3:114,115).

God knows Jews are conscious of God.

Israel will have a good year.

# # #

Reference

Al Bawaba (publication).  "Lebanon: Over 20 killed and wounded in Tripoli blast."  September 29, 2008: http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/Lebanon/236375

Avni, Benny.  "Syria Threatens 'Consequences' for Israel."  The New York Sun, September 12, 2007: http://www.nysun.com/foreign/syria-threatens-consequences-for-israel/62454/

Doc Searls Weblog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/about/

Dakroub, Hussein.  "Officials: 5 killed in northern Lebanon explosion."  Boston Globe, September 19, 2008: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2008/09/29/officials_say_15_dead_or_hurt_in_lebanon_explosion/

Haleem, M.A.S. Abdel.  The Qur'an.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Intellicast.  Weather report, Beirut, Lebanon: http://www.intellicast.com/local/weather.aspx?location=LEXX0003

Kershner, Isabel.  "At West Bank Conference, Dreams of Investment."  The New York Times, May 22, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/world/middleeast/22bethlehem.html?ref=todayspaper

Lewy, Glen S. and Abraham H. Foxman.  "Rosh Hashanah 5769: Looking Back & Looking Foward."  September 23, 2008: http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/International_Affairs/20080928_op-ed.htm

Moisa, Tal.  "Apples and Honey for a Sweet New Year."  Israel Defense Forces web, September 29, 2008: http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/News/today/2008n/09/2801.htm

Soghoian, Chris.  "For Hezbollah, it's fiber warfare."  May 13, 2008: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9942250-46.html

Wedeman, Ben and Anthony Mills, contributors.  "Lebanon hails militants freed in prisoner swap."  CNN, July 17, 2008: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/16/israel.swap/index.html

Weir, Keith, Editor.  "CHRONOLOGY-Attacks on Lebanese security forces." Reauters, September 29, 2008: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LT474773.htm

Comments

[tammy swofford]

Here is a link for you, Jim.

http://reformsyria.org/

Tammy