Lebanon tidings...

Covert op? I strongly urge readers to check out Xymphora's latest. Turns out that those captured Israeli soldiers were inside Lebanon. Mr. X suspects that Israeli intelligence intentionally blew their mission in order to create a cause for war. Anyone who has read Victor Ostrovsky's books will recognise the plausibility of this hypothesis.

Chemical Weapons: The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the likely Israeli use of CBW.

Oil spill disaster: When Israel bombed a power plant in Lebanon, 10,000 to 30,000 tons of oil spilled into the Mediterranean. Even under the best of circumstances, Lebanon has no ability to repair an ecological disaster on that scale.

U.S. Troops? Condoleeza insists that American soldiers will play no role in Lebanese peacekeeping, but Ken Silverstein of Harpers reports that

...a well-connected former CIA officer has told me that the Bush Administration is in fact considering exactly such a deployment.
The officer, who had broad experience in the Middle East while at the CIA, noted that NATO and European countries, including England, have made clear that they are either unwilling or extremely reluctant to participate in an international force. Given other nations' lack of commitment, any “robust” force—between 10,000 and 30,000 troops, according to estimates being discussed in the media—would by definition require major U.S. participation.

GIYUS is an acronym for Give Israel Your United Support, an "Israel First" web site promoting the use of a tool called "Megaphone." This application facilitates the sharing of pro-Israel articles and alerts users to online polls on the Israeli invasion. This software is part of a larger plan by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to mobilize 100,000 propagandists. So far, GIYUS has attracted fewer than a thousand participants. For more, read here and here.

I'd advise against downloading Megaphone (which may have spyware), but you can safely use the online version of the application -- and you can use it against the makers' interests, if you participate in those online polls.

By the way: Did you know that the unpleasantness in Lebanon is due to "Iran's holy war" in that country? You learn such amazing things from a site like GIYUS!

Finally: Maybe OIL is the new oil: Did you know that there once was a pipeline which brought oil from the Iraqi city of Mosul to Israel's northern port of Haifa? Some folks in Israel hope to restore this pipeline -- but doing so would require regime change in Syria.