Clearly Ned Lamont's victory is something good--though the question is how big a thing and how good? Clearly Ned Lamont is a good guy and a better Democrat than Joe Lieberman or the rest of the members of the Democratic Establishment Suicide Machine (DESM). I was hoping that these things could be taken for granted.

My post was an expression of my frustration with the fact that much of the left blogosphere has been focused on Lamont's race as if that, and not the U.S./Israeli War on Lebanon, were the biggest issue of the day. This has bothered me so much that I haven't had the stomach even to read Atrios and Jane Hamsher anymore.

Everyone here seems to think that in attacking Ned Lamont--in a petulant and silly and hopefully symbolic way--I was letting my own obsession with the Israel question prevent me from seeing and acknowledging a relatively simple good thing that a lot of people have been working hard to make happen. And I do apologize to any readers who actually have worked hard to help Lamont win. I'm grateful for your effort, and I'm glad you made it happen.

But I really do see the Lebanon War as being so terrible as to overshadow the significance of Lamont's win. And I also think that the Democratic support for Israel (Lamont's unstinting support included) is not just wrong, but part of the still ongoing failure of the Democrats to oppose the Bush administration. That is my bottom line here. I'm not trying to insist that everyone care about my own preoccupations. I'm trying to say that the Lebanon War cannot be separated from the Iraq War, from the neocon ascendancy, from rising fascism and Christian nationalism in the U.S.A.

As I emphasized in a comment at the end of the thread on the Galloway post below, I find it impossible to look clearly at the devastation being wrought in Lebanon and then to assert that this war is really about Hizballah. Heymann Bredt himself admitted that this war seems disastrously disproportionate or misdirected insofar as it is against Hezbollah. He also said that perhaps the IDF has some strategy or set of targets that we don't understand.

Rather than speculate, I will take things at face value. Israel is destroying the civil infrastructure of Lebanon, killing thousands, and setting the stage for total chaos within Lebanon for years to come. I believe, then, that this is what Israel is trying to do.

The leader of this operation, General Dan Halutz, said at the start of the war that he wanted to "turn the clock back on Lebanon 20 years." He said this. It's not a rumor. He said it at a press conference. What does this mean? It means, beyond any doubt, that the purpose of the war is to reduce Lebanon to the state it was in 20 years ago. Does it not mean this? And what was happening in Lebanon 20 years ago? Full scale civil war between Sunni, Shi'a, and Christians.

The Christians--a neo-fascist militia called the Phalange--were supported by Israel, and their leader was installed in Beirut by the Israelis, before he was killed. Ariel Sharon, the architect of that first Lebanon war, told his old IDF comrade and fellow 1948 veteran Uri Avnery that the purpose of that war was to foment chaos and then to install a Christian dictator in Beirut. Of course, the publicly avowed purpose was to protect the Galilee from PLO rockets--but it is a matter of widely reported historical record that there were no PLO rockets fired from Lebanon for 11 months before the launching of "Operation Peace in Galilee."

Now we have General Dan Halutz saying that he intends to turn the clock back 20 years in Lebanon. Does that mean routing out Hizballah and exacting a few civilian casualties as unfortunate but necessary instances of "collateral damage"? Or does that mean just what it appears to mean--a meaning which corresponds very well to what Israel is actually and manifestly doing?

Why would Israel want to foment chaos in Lebanon? I don't know. It is a question I've been asking repeatedly. But I do know that IDF representatives have been sharing their plans for this war with American generals for the last year. I know tht this war has been undertaken with American approval and, more, encouragment. And in the early days of the war, when it first became clear that Hizballah wasn't going away, it was the Americans who made sure the war continued by refusing to provide the Israelis with any way out. In those days, there were numerous interviews with IDF people who said that it was clear that the Americans were more in favor of the war than the Israelis themselves. And note something else: the war in Iraq has created chaos in Iraq. To create chaos in Lebanon would be to realize further the neocon vision of "creative destruction" (or, to use Cunt-o-leena's phrase, "birth pangs") in the Middle East.

As Daniel Levy, an Israeli negotiator at Oslo, writes in this important piece from Haaretz, there is a group of radical Americans and Israelis, Jewish and Christian, who have gotten the President's ear and are bringing about an unprecedented fusion of U.S. and Israeli foreign policies. They were responsible for Iraq, and they are responsible for whatever it is that is going on Lebanon.

These people are the enemies of humanity. They are the true masters of Lieberman, whose defeat I would like to celebrate. And yet Lamont, the vanquisher of Lieberman, along with every single Democrat, has leapt to support this new phase of the neoconservative nightmare. We may wish that Lebanon could be separated from Iraq, that the Democrats could oppose Bush and fascism without opposing Israel, that a reckoning isn't at hand. But I think that that wish is only a wish--a fantasy. The War in Lebanon is it, it is the next step, it is the Bush junta once again seizing the initiative and changing the rules of the game. It is where and how the global catastrophe will continue to unfold.