10
August 2006
Clueless in Condi-land
How clear is the U.S. endgame in
Lebanon?
With the war in Lebanon one month
old this week, the jury is still out on whether the Bush administration can
call the Israeli military campaign it is actively supporting a success or
failure. The country will not return to the status quo ante which existed
before July 12, when Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed three
others in Israeli territory, and that's a good thing; but U.S. management of
the diplomatic initiative since then has been halting, raising doubts again
about whether the administration is better at launching bold initiatives than
successfully seeing them through.
Time will tell how carefully the
Americans and Israelis planned their riposte to Hezbollah's kidnapping of the
Israelis. Two weeks ago, a Hezbollah spokesman, Mahmoud Komati, declared that
the party had been surprised by Israel’s reaction. Many took this as an
admission of error. It was more likely a self-serving effort to deflect blame away
from Hezbollah for having provoked the conflict. After all, in a speech the
same day, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that he had discovered
that Israel intended to launch a major military operation in October.
Therefore, he must have known that the Israeli government might engage in harsh
retaliation before that deadline.
But Hezbollah's inconsistencies
don't necessarily mean there was no Israeli-American collusion; there likely
was. The real question is how comprehensive a plan both sides had, and how well
advanced it was when Hezbollah decided to kidnap the Israelis. Nasrallah's
point about the October deadline was that Hezbollah had pre-empted the
Israelis, therefore forcing them into a fight advantageous to his combatants.
He might have been spouting propaganda. But is it possible he was right?
The U.S. took 12 days to make a
grand entry into the diplomacy of the war, then stalled. On July 24, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Beirut to meet with Lebanese Prime Minister
Fouad Siniora. She also presided over a lunch at the U.S. ambassador's
residence, mainly with members of anti-Syrian groups--the so-called "March
14 movement." At that session, she announced that the U.S. wanted to
create a 20-kilometer buffer zone in south Lebanon where an international force
would be deployed. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt reacted by saying that such
a zone wouldn't prevent Hezbollah from firing over the peacekeepers' heads.
Several of those present agreed, and Rice told her assistant secretary of
state, David Welch, to take note of the comments. The American attitude then
changed from advocating a thin buffer zone to bringing about the
demilitarization of south Lebanon.
After Lebanon, Rice traveled to
Israel, and planned to return to Beirut the following Sunday, July 30. However,
when more than two-dozen people were killed in the bombing of a home in Qana
that day, Siniora told her that he could not receive her before a full
ceasefire was in place, and she cancelled her visit. This was followed by over
a week of virtual political inaction in Washington.
Rice was caught in proliferating
dilemmas. The administration wanted the Israelis to gain a decisive military
advantage over Hezbollah before moving to negotiations. That meant delaying a
ceasefire for as long as possible. However, delaying a ceasefire also meant
allowing the carnage to continue, which discredited the U.S., but also the
United Nations and the Siniora government, those parties expected to squeeze
Hezbollah hardest on its disarmament and for a deployment of the Lebanese Army
to the Israeli border. Rice also had to be careful that U.S. support for Israel
would not embarrass Siniora, who was keen to see Hezbollah weakened, but who
didn't want to be denounced as an American-Israeli agent.
Worse, Rice's Beirut stopover
confirmed that the Bush administration wasn't sure about what it wanted to
achieve. It took a Lebanese politician to make the obvious point that Hezbollah
would not go along with an American-imposed peace plan and that a 20-kilometer
buffer zone would be useless in protecting Israel; yet surely someone at Foggy
Bottom could have told Rice that before she alighted in Beirut. And if her
rather sudden default plan was a full demilitarization of the south, then who
was supposed to implement such an ambitious scheme?
The answer was perhaps obvious to
Rice: Israel. The only problem is that Israel wasn't much clearer about its
ultimate aims than the U.S. Its first reaction to the abduction of its troops
was to launch a vast air campaign directed against Lebanese infrastructure,
particularly roads and bridges, and against predominantly Shiite areas. The
point was to break Shiite morale, make it infinitely more difficult for
Hezbollah to attack Israel in the future, since this would involve absorbing
similar suffering, mobilize a majority of Lebanese society against the party's
adventurism, and cut off rearmament routes between Syria and Hezbollah
fighters.
The plan was partly successful.
Hezbollah's vaunted deterrence capability, which was supposed to protect
Iranian nuclear facilities from an American or Israeli attack, was used up to
no real benefit. The party will indeed think twice before hitting Israel again,
and given the massive devastation of Shiite areas, it will have to spend the
next several years behaving more like the Salvation Army than a militant
revolutionary movement if it wants to preserve its base of support. And
Hezbollah's standing in Lebanese society has taken a massive tumble, with a
firm consensus among many non-Shiites that it's time for the party to surrender
its arms and join the system.
The thing is, the Israeli plan
has to date failed to achieve much on the ground. Hezbollah continues to fire
rockets into Israel, retains control over much of south Lebanon, and has
leveraged this to claim it is defeating Israel. Nor are there signs the
Israelis quite know what they want to do next, with the government of Ehud
Olmert saying it might make a grand thrust into Lebanon, pushing Hezbollah to the
Litani River, but also worried this might provoke casualties and drag Israel
back into a quagmire. On Wednesday the long-awaited Israeli invasion seemed to
have started; on Thursday, however, Olmert said he would allow more time for
diplomacy. Some Israelis are criticizing the initial over-reliance on air
power, while others say the government was never offered an operational plan by
the military.
This is not good news for the
Bush administration. If the gist of the American plan was to subcontract Hezbollah's
military elimination to Israel (and is the flip side of this a future American
attack against Iran?), the U.S. is now dependant on Israeli dynamics over which
it has limited control. Indeed, as the Israeli planning stumbled forward, so
too did American diplomacy. Earlier this week the administration and France
agreed a draft U.N. resolution that would begin the process of resolving the
crisis. Since then, the two sides have differed over a Lebanese desire to amend
the proposal, and they are currently trying to reconcile their views. Whatever
the merits or demerits of Lebanon's position, it was the Lebanese, not Rice,
who appeared to be better playing the negotiation process.
The outcome of the Lebanon war
remains very uncertain. The likelihood is that things will escalate much
further before getting any better. Israel needs to prove to the U.S. that it
can be militarily effective, while no one--not the international community, not
the Arab states, not most non-Shiite Lebanese, and not the Siniora government--can
afford to let Hezbollah, and the party's Svengali, Iran, emerge from the
free-for-all in a better position. But in all this confusion it would be
reassuring to know the Bush administration has a better grasp of the endgame.
In fact exactly the opposite looks to be true.
Reason contributing editor
Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.
http://www.reason.com/links/links081006.shtml
Copyright © 2005 Reason
Foundation
GKronfli@aol.com
Date: Tue, 15
Aug 2006 07:44:49 EDT
Bush and
Condi, an imbecile and an idiot lead by the nose to catastrophe by Jewry.
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:28:19 -0400
(Eastern Daylight Time)
From: "Naim S.
Mahlab" <nsm@videotron.ca>
The way I see it is that this is a 'skirmish'
between Iran, through its proxy Hizballah, and the USA through its proxy
Israel.
Israel must have been watching the
accumulation of missiles by Hizballah with a great deal of anxiety. Why would some
10,000
missiles be needed by this group,
unless they meant to attack Israel. It
therefore seized the occasion to attack when Uncle Sam
expressed his approval.
The mistake it made was that, based
on its prior experience with Arab armies, it did not mobilize its forces adequately to
face the much better trained and supplied forces of Hizballah. The stiff
resistance it met with must have panicked PM Olmert, which led to the blanket
bombing of Lebanon's infrastructure and Shiite enclaves.
The Sunni Arab states must be
watching this battle with a great deal of interest. They are wary of Iran's
ambitions. They probably feel that they are in Iran's crosshair as the next
target. Iran has the ability to block the straights of Hormuz and thus block
all movement of oil out of the Persian Gulf. This would destroy the economies
of Kuweit and Saudi Arabia, and will severely harm
Iran's. But religious fanatics are
not loath to commit suicide as long as they can hurt their perceived enemies.
The whole Near East is also worried
about Iran's nuclear 'research', which increases the discomfort of the Sunni
Arabs.
The real victim is Lebanon. The
Lebanese Govt felt impotent when faced with Hizballah better equipped forces,
and could not become involved in a battle with the much more equipped Israeli
forces. It had to bear the brunt of
the Israeli attack which, effectively, destroyed the Lebanese economy.
I do not know how this conflict will
end, but I do know that the western Powers owe Lebanon a great deal of aid to
help rebuild the country.
I have never been able to understand
our species ability to hate and to destroy. This always brings to mind the
words of Jean de
La Fontaine ' Patience et longueur
de temps, font plus que force ni que rage'. or 'by time and toil we sever, what
strength and rage could never.'
Naim S. Mahlab