U.S. Bunker-Buster Smart-Bombs Pound Gaza
- Details
- Category: International
- Created on Monday, 29 December 2008 13:01
- Written by Mike Ely
"Israel Using New US-Supplied Smart Bombs in Gaza Attacks" Livni Expects International Community to Support Operation
December 28, 2008
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared Hamas responsible for all the killings in Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, it was easy to dismiss it as an expression of the Bush Administration’s “special relationship” with the Israeli government and knee-jerk support for any killings with the word terrorist remotely linked to them. Yet it seems there may have been a more practical concern of culpability at play.
When the Israeli government was bombing every police station in the densely populated strip, some of those attacks were coming by way of US-supplied GBU-39 smart bombs. It is unclear how many of the hundreds of people killed in the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours died at the hands of American munitions, but to the extent that the carnage has gotten some television coverage in the United States, direct American involvement is likely to be unpopular with a war-weary nation.
And while the Bush Administration is unreservedly in support of the attacks, the incoming Obama Administration, just weeks from inauguration, is using it’s default cop-out excuse to avoid commenting, with David Axelrod declaring that “only one president can speak for America,” and “that president now is George W. Bush.”
But for the rest of the world, outside of the US and British governments, most urge both sides of the conflict to stop their attacks and return to the bargaining table. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni lashed out at the calls for peace, demanding that the international community “support things that are not easy to support,” in this case the evisceration of the Gaza Strip. She insisted that only through backing the Israeli attacks will the offensive be short.
Comments (2)
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Guest (Stanley W. Rogouski)
Permalink<i>And while the Bush Administration is unreservedly in support of the attacks, the incoming Obama Administration, just weeks from inauguration, is using it’s default cop-out excuse to avoid commenting, with David Axelrod declaring that “only one president can speak for America,” and “that president now is George W. Bush.”
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I was taking photos at the big rally last night, and people kept walking up to me and saying "send your photos to George Bush with a pair of dirty shoes."
When I remarked that maybe I'd be better off sending them to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, it didn't necessarily register.
What I also noticed was that there were no "mainstream" progressive organizations at the rally and (oddly, very oddly) no real attempt to reach anybody outside of the Jewish community. There were a lot of signs that, for lack of a better way to describe it, alternately wanted to shame American Jews or reach out to their better natures. There were no signs condemning Clinton or Obama and no signs that attempted to phrase the conflict in distinctively "American" terms. There was "Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto," for example, and no "funding Israel is taxation without representation."
Anyway, it strikes me that if you mainly address other Arabs and American Jews and not the American people as a whole, you're at best going to appeal to a tiny percentage of left wing Jews and, of course, your own, isolated, and largely demonized community.0 Like
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