Israel has destroyed a country here. It was a beautiful country. It was a country with a great deal of potential, and it was finally coming back together after a 20-year civil war, in which Israel itself had played a very sinister role. So for it now to come again and destroy the country under the pretext of fighting Hezbollah, which consists -- fighting Hezbollah has been a very small part of what they have been doing, is a war crime. I mean, the Israelis are guilty, quite frankly, of numerous war crimes, and that's the reason Tony Blair won't say that their response has been indiscriminate -- or has been disproportionate, because disproportionate attacks are war crimes in international law.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, what are the aims of the players here, of Hezbollah, of Israel, of the United States? And what role is Iran and Syria playing?

JUAN COLE: Well, Hezbollah is mainly a localistic movement. It's a movement that represents the roughly 1.5 million Shiites that live in the south of Lebanon, many of them poor, sharecroppers, tobacco sharecroppers or slum dwellers in cities like Tyre or Southern Beirut, and so it's a movement of the poor. It's a movement that grew up -- you know, we never heard anything about the dangers of the Lebanese Shiites back in the 1960s or back in the 1940s. They have been radicalized, and they have moved to support for Hezbollah, because of a long struggle, an 18-year struggle, to get the Israelis out of Lebanese territory. The Israelis occupied Southern Lebanon all that time and quite brutally, and Hezbollah represents the aspirations for freedom from occupation and for a better life for the Shiites of Southern Lebanon.

Yes, it has foreign backers. It has backers in Syria and Iran, but then that's the way Lebanon works. The Maronite Catholics are backed by France and the United States. The Sunni Lebanese are backed by Saudi Arabia. The objectionable thing to Hezbollah is that it is a paramilitary organization. It's not formally part of the government, although it is represented in the government, but it has 5,000 fighters and all of these rockets, most of them fairly small with a range of about three to four miles.

AMY GOODMAN: And the United States?

JUAN COLE: Well, the United States wants to destroy Hezbollah. It has an old grudge with it, because Hezbollah did hit U.S. targets back in the 1980s, and it is seen by the conservatives in the Bush administration as a cat's paw of Iran. They don't pay attention to its local Lebanese context, and they don't see Israel's repeated invasions and attacks on Lebanon as having provoked this response. And it's likely that a lot of what's being done in Lebanon is a demonstration project. It's an attempt to scare Iran into ceasing its own nuclear enrichment program, which the Iranians maintain is for civilian purposes, but which the West suspects may lead to an Iranian nuclear bomb. So it is said that the Israelis and the hawks in the United States want the Iranians to look at Beirut and think, “Well, gee, that could happen to Tehran if we don't come aboard.”

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. We're speaking to him at the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor studios. I wanted to ask about media coverage here. We did a whole panel on it yesterday -- you’re reading media all over the world as you put together your column, “Informed Comment” -- about overall media coverage, how people are coming to understand this conflict in the United States. And, for example, one of CNN'S chief anchors, Wolf Blitzer, has just returned from Jerusalem, who in the 1970s was an AIPAC lobbyist. What effect do you think that has on the coverage?

JUAN COLE: Well, I have to defend Wolf Blitzer. I mean, everybody has a past somewhere, but he is one of the very few powerful news people in the United States that actually puts Middle Easterners on the screen and lets them speak for themselves. Almost nobody else does that, and so I am sure he has his own point of view on things, but I think he generally plays a positive role in allowing a greater variety of voices to be heard from the region, precisely because he does know the region well.

With regard to general coverage, of course, you know, there is something peculiar about the United States. Its media, its corporate media are very rightwing, and the American public seems to put up with what is, generally speaking, pretty poor news coverage. There are relatively few bureaus left around the world. Most American news reporting from the Middle East is done from Israel, and so it's very skewed. It's pro-Israeli, of course, in a way that the news gathering in virtually any other country in the world besides Israel is not.

On the other hand, because Lebanon was a cosmopolitan country that was highly interlinked with the rest of the world, I think the Israelis have been surprised by the degree to which they have been unable to hide from the world the worst consequences of their bombing raids, and I think the Israelis have not been able to keep the world from knowing what's happening in Lebanon, in a way that they generally do succeed in Gaza and the West Bank.

And by the way, the situation in Gaza, where the Israelis knocked out the major power plant and where they have made repeated incursions, air raids, tank incursions and so forth against Palestinians, which there's been high rates of death of Palestinian civilians, all of this has gone under the radar, because the world is focused on Lebanon, which is a much more accessible story still than the West Bank and Gaza.