By PATRICK COCKBURN
Lebanon may be the ‘battleground of the Middle East’, as Hirst’s subtitle suggests, but this does not explain how it has become such a lethal trap for its tormentors over the last thirty years. The very absence of government appears to make the country easy meat, but would-be occupiers find that there is no uncontested local authority to co-opt or intimidate. Lebanon is high up on the list of countries which Washington think tanks patronizingly refer to as ‘failed states’ with the implication that they are political basket cases where foreign powers are justified in intervening because of the absence of a sovereign power. But the think tankers seldom mention that it is in these supposedly ‘failed states’ that the US has suffered its worst humiliations in the years since 242 US marines were blown up in their barracks beside Beirut airport by a suicide bomber in 1983.
American intervention in states without effective governments has been almost uniformly disastrous. After the Marines were killed Ronald Reagan hastily withdrew survivors from Lebanon and invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada by way of diversion. The debacle in Beirut was not unique. Ten years later the US intervention in Somalia ended humiliatingly after the bodies of US helicopter pilots were photographed being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Post 9/11, easy initial victories in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to show that the US was the super-power it claimed to be, but early successes turned into draining guerrilla wars in which the $500-billion-a-year US military machine was baffled by a few tens of thousands of guerrillas. Conflicts expected to be short and victorious turned out to be long and inconclusive. The very puniness of America’s opponents made failure to win more damaging and withdrawal more humiliating.
Also from Counterpunch:
Dave Lindorff, A Whistleblower Bounty on Corporate Crime
Gatien Elie, Allan Popelard and Paul Vannier, France's New Rural Ghettos
Tom Genrich / Michele Parry, Back to the Land in France: Settler's By Choice
Ralph Nader, The Spectulator's Rebate
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