Opinion A birth or a funeral? By Jennifer Matsui	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
誕生、それとも葬式？ ライス米国務長官は、中東が今経験している危機を、 新生の中東誕生のための「生みの苦しみ」と呼んでいる。 だが、イスラエルの攻撃を受けている人々は何と呼ぶだろう･･･。

Some argue that the recent Israeli-led strikes on the Palestinian civilian population, the destruction of its vital infrastructure, and the capture and imprisonment of its democratically elected leaders were merely a rehearsal for a well-planned attack against Lebanon, as well as Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Sudan.

This explanation flies in the face of Israel's justification for its attack on Lebanon, which according to them, was in retaliation for the kidnapping of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah fighters.

But clearly, the Israelis were looking for any excuse to launch this attack against Lebanon, and the two unfortunate reservists, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, became the unwitting trigger.

Israel's indiscriminate slaughter of Lebanese civilians has been compared to an elephant herd's deadly rampage in response to a single mosquito bite. It may be a good way to describe Israel's disproportionate sense of outrage to Hezbollah's provocations, but it overlooks a more logical rationale for Israel's seemingly irrational behavior.

General Wesley Clarke, a former NATO commander and one-time presidential candidate in the United States, recently revealed a highly classified Pentagon plan to attack Lebanon in 2001 as the first stage of a military campaign to reshape the Middle East into a group of U.S. client states.

In Iraq, the impending break up of the country into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish territories is not an unfortunate and unforeseeable result of a flawed military plan, but it is the intention all along of U.S. war planners, who believe they can more easily take advantage of a divided and warring population.

Now, we can see the same strategy being applied to Lebanon, where yet another civil war could break out, and the country's leadership is powerless to prevent renewed Israeli expansion of its borders and control of Lebanon's vital supply lines.

And so the United States plunges further into barbarism, with Israel as its willing partner in crimes against humanity.

Increasingly, world opinion is against Israel and the United States, which it regards as the greatest threats to peace and stability in the world. With its ballooning trade deficits and overstretched military capability, the United States can no longer afford to squander any more of its already bankrupted credibility.

The end result could very well be the collapse of the American Empire, including the Jewish state it gave birth to in the wake of an earlier genocide.

America's angel of death, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, compares the current crisis to "birth pangs," explaining the Middle East is in the latter stages of labor, and about to give birth to a shiny new democracy.

She may call this savage ceremony a baptism, but the people of Lebanon and Gaza would call it a funeral. But whose funeral is yet to be determined.

(459 words)