Robert Fisk: Lebanon's pain grows by the hour as death toll hits 1,300
Robert Fisk is reporting this morning that, as the Lebanese clear away the rubble of their cities besieged by Israeli forces, the real civilian death toll in Lebanon is revealing itself as higher than anything previously reported.
What really annoys me as I read this is that all these people died needlessly. Olmert did not rescue the kidnapped soldiers and will now have to conduct a prisoner swap, the very thing that was always on offer to him from the beginning of this dispute.By last night, they had found 61 more bodies, taking the Lebanese dead of the 33-day war to almost 1,300.
In Srifa, south of the Litani river, they found 26 bodies beneath ruins which I myself stood on just three days ago. At Ainata, there were eight more bodies of civilians. A corpse was discovered beneath a collapsed four-storey house north of Tyre and, near by, the remains of a 16-year old girl, along with three children and an adult. In Khiam in eastern Lebanon, besieged by the Israelis for more than a month, the elderly village "mukhtar" was found dead in the ruins of his home.
Israel's response to Hizbullah's actions were mostly acts of revenge taken against a civilian population and large numbers of those dead are women and children. Fisk then makes the larger point:
How many of these dead would have survived if George Bush and Tony Blair had demanded an immediate ceasefire weeks ago will never be known. But many would have had the chance of life had Western governments not regarded this dirty war as an "opportunity" to create a "new" Middle East by humbling Iran and Syria.He is right. It is all very well to condemn the disgraceful Israeli overreaction and the terrible methods employed against civilians in an act of collective punishment, but we must never forget that they were cheered on and, in fact, encouraged by Bush, Blair and their cohorts.
Had they called for an immediate cease-fire many of these women and children would be alive.
They have died. And Bush, Blair and the neo-cons have not only failed to achieve anything, they have made Israel less safe by leading her to her first military loss since 1948.
If we truly lived in democracies these men would now be driven from power such would be the level of public anger directed against them. But Bush especially is safe, knowing that he lives in a country where he can declare defeat a victory and know that the good folk over at Fox News will repeat his lies as if they are facts.
Stalin's Soviet Union never designed anything as dangerous to democracy as Fox.
Click title for full Fisk article.
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