In a recent dispatch for Politico Magazine, Elliott Abrams - neocon extraordinaire, former component of the Ronald Reagan and George W Bush administrations, and current senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC - warns that “Lebanon is boiling” and that “thousands of Americans could get stuck in the middle of a war”.
The gist of the article, co-written by Abrams’ colleague Zachary Shapiro, is that the United States must formulate a comprehensive evacuation plan for its citizens in Lebanon, in preparation for the next seemingly inevitable showdown with Israel.
During the 2006 war, in which Israel killed an estimated 1,200 people in Lebanese territory - the majority of them civilians - the US deigned to evacuate some 15,000 citizens, after initially attempting to bill them for the privilege.
The US undersecretary of state for political affairs defended the attempted billing on the grounds that the government had had to “go out on an emergency basis and rent [evacuation] vessels”.
By contrast, rush-shipping bombs to the Israeli military was apparently neither too much of a hassle nor too much of an expense.
Evacuation will be even trickier in the next war, Abrams and Shapiro argue, as “every indication is that it will be a fiercer conflict than in 2006”. This is presumably true, since Israeli officials have spent the better part of the last 12 years threatening that they will no longer hold back in Lebanon - as if they ever did. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.