The Israeli strategy appears to be designed to do two things. First, the Israelis are trying to prevent any supplies from entering Lebanon, including reinforcements. That is why they are attacking all coastal maritime facilities. Second, they are degrading the roads in Lebanon. That will keep reinforcements from reaching Hezbollah fighters engaged in the south. As important, it will prevent the withdrawal and redeployment of heavy equipment deployed by Hezbollah in the south, particularly their rockets, missiles and launchers. The Israelis are preparing the battlefield to prevent a Hezbollah retreat or maneuver.

Hezbollah's strategy has been imposed on it. It seems committed to standing and fighting. The rate of fire they are maintaining into Israel is clearly based on an expectation that Israel will be attacking. The rocketry guarantees the Israelis will attack. Hezbollah has been reported to have anti-tank and anti-air weapons. The Israelis will use airmobile tactics to surround and isolate Hezbollah concentrations, but in the end, they will have to go in, engage and defeat Hezbollah tactically. Hezbollah obviously knows this, but there is no sign of disintegration on its part. At the very least, Hezbollah is projecting an appetite for combat. Sources in Beirut, who have been reliable to this point, say Hezbollah has weapons that have not yet been seen, such as anti-aircraft missiles, and that these will be used shortly. Whatever the truth of this, Hezbollah does not seem to think its situation is hopeless.

The uncertain question is Syria. No matter how effectively Israel seals the Lebanese coast, so long as the Syrian frontier is open, Hezbollah might get supplies from there, and might be able to retreat there. So far, there has been only one reported airstrike on a Syrian target. Both Israel and Syria were quick to deny this....

The problem is this: While Syria does not want to get hit and will not make overt moves, so long as the Syrians cannot guarantee supplies will not reach Hezbollah or that Hezbollah won't be given sanctuary in Syria, Israel cannot complete its mission of shattering Hezbollah and withdrawing. They could be drawn into an Iraq-like situation that they absolutely don't want. Israel is torn. On the one hand, it wants to crush Hezbollah, and that requires total isolation. On the other hand, it does not want the Syrian regime to fall. What comes after would be much worse from Israel's point of view.

Israel suddenly found itself under attack from precisely those territories which it had evacuated. Let's be absolutely clear about the nature of the attack. It was not the case that some Palestinian "militants" (as the BBC calls them) seized one Israeli soldier near Gaza. Those same terrorists (let us call things by their right names), having interpreted the 2005 withdrawal as a sign of Israeli weakness, have been bombarding the western Negev desert for months with their Qassam missiles. And at the first opportunity, the Palestinians voted out the regime which had recognised the right of the Jewish state to exist and replaced it with the Islamo-fascist Hamas, which aims to create an Islamist state from the Jordan river to the sea.

The Islamo-fascists of Hizbollah joined in the fun shortly thereafter with a massive rocket barrage attacking Israeli towns, cities and kibbutzim from the shores of the Mediterranean to the foothills of the Golan, destroying homes and killing and wounding innocent civilians. Under cover of that barrage, they launched a raid to kill and capture Israeli soldiers on Israeli soil.

Israel is under attack -- unprovoked, brutal attack. Attack by forces such as Hamas and Hizbollah with which socialists have nothing in common.

Iran proved that it's able to drag the region into a state of chaos by maneuvering its tools in Syria, Hizbollah, Hamas and the militias in Iraq. Iran knows that such a conflict directed by militias that blend with civilians will lead to long-lasting chaos and represents a half-solution that debilitates the other powers and at the same time it's not a costly tactic for Iran! A 100 million dollars in the hands of gangs are enough to cause a lot of destruction that cannot be cured by billions in reconstruction, and it always costs less to destruct than to build.

The key point in this strategy is to keep the half-solution alive. This method proved successful in keeping the despotic regimes in power for decades and these regimes think this strategy is still valid.

...

The question is did Iran make the right calculations this time? And is the world willing to accept more of those half-solutions?

I don't think so…

Trying to play the same scenario and adopt the same policies over and over again will bring undesirable outcomes for Iran this time and I can see that there's an Israeli determination to break the cycle; the thing is that Israel does not have to deal with the problem that America has to deal with; Israel does not have the political brakes that view the war in different ways. I mean to Israel this war is about existence and that's why Israel is going to go as far as it takes to secure this existence while the geographically-distant America view it differently and the attitude of some Americans who feel that this war is not that serious is understood.

The question of whether the Trotskyist movement is anti-Semitic arises primarily if one thinks of anti-Semitism as an all-or-none phenomenon. But a moment's reflection shows that, like Marx himself, a movement may well show anti-Semitic aspects without thereby becoming totally anti-Semitic in its nature.

All Trotskyist groups declare their staunch opposition to anti-Semitism while being hostile to the Zionist enterprise. Most of the groups wish the destruction of Israel and, toward that end, support Israel's most irreconcilable enemies.