When St Augustine converted to
Christianity, he prayed to become virtuous - but
not just yet. Similarly, US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and the Israelis want a
ceasefire, but not just yet. They also did not
want a multinational force, but the yet has caught
up with them already.
In fact, now that
the Israeli vision of rapid and complete victory
has evaporated, they want an international force
so much that their former robust refusal has
dropped down the memory hole.
Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would stop the
offensive "only after a robust international
peacekeeping force is in place in southern Lebanon
to protect Israel from border raids and rocket
attacks".
Even if everyone is too polite
to mention that Olmert is eating his words, the
force is his only feasible exit strategy, unless the
Israelis follow the
neo-conservative plan of digging themselves deeper
into the hole they have made, and continue their
assault, sending in more troops.
Unless
they suffer another outbreak of stupidity, the
Israeli leadership will be looking for a ceasefire
and an international force that they can disguise
as a victory, but with the casualties and costs to
Israel of the Hezbollah bombing, and the
diplomatic costs of the Lebanese casualties, it
will take some very heavy disguise.
Insofar as the assault on Lebanon has any
rationale, it was that Olmert and Defense Minister
Amir Peretz had hoped to prove to a skeptical
Israeli electorate that, despite their lack of
military experience, they really were tough guys.
As Shimon Peres proved in 1996, the last Qana
massacre, killing Lebanese wholesale seems the
approved way for Israeli politicians to assert
their military machismo, even if each time they
predictably come unstuck.
There are
reports of intelligence failures that led the
Israeli leadership into thinking that they could
breeze into Lebanon, whack Hezbollah and declare
victory (see A new face to Hezbollah's
resistance, August 3).
That
combination of credulity for wish-fulfillment
intelligence and a desire to disguise military
experience is so reminiscent of President George W
Bush that we should not be too surprised that he
has applauded the disaster from the beginning.
Diplomatically, any solution has to allow
all sides to declare victory and back down, and
the idea of a force authorized by the United
Nations seems to be the preferred ladder for
everyone to climb down, which is of course rich in
irony, since the Khiyam bombing certainly
expressed Israeli commanders' true feelings about
both the UN and international forces, all the more
so since Likud, the party whose founders killed UN
representative Count Bernadotte, has packed the
high command while it has been in power. But the
politicians can claim victory if an international
force is on border - the other side, of course.
For its part, Hezbollah, by standing up to
the Israelis for far longer than any recent Arab
armies, has already won a victory politically in
the Arab world. A payoff that may persuade the
Lebanese and Hezbollah could be the handover of
the Sheba Farms area to Lebanon, or to the UN
force.
The question here, certainly not
helped by Damascus' reticence about Lebanese
borders in general, is whether the Israelis are
occupying Syrian or Lebanese territory. One thing
is sure, these are not Israeli territories. In
fact, they come, like the Golan and the
Palestinian territories, under UN Resolution 242,
long outstanding, which says the Israelis should
get out of them anyway.
It would certainly
be anomalous to have a UN force enforcing Israeli
control of annexed territories; Israel would have
to "un-annex" them, since it grabbed them as part
of the Golan Heights.
But the problem with
an international force is, of course, in the
details. If its task is simply to disarm
Hezbollah, which does after all have the support
of most of the people living in the south, it will
soon be getting the dedicated militant attention
that drove Israel out, unless it shows
even-handedness by resisting Israeli incursions
into Lebanon, which are in fact much more frequent
than those going the other way.
The pipe
dream of it patrolling the hitherto loosely
demarcated border with Syria sounds like the
invention of someone trying to prevent any force
at all being established.
The fig leaf for
the multinational force would be the restoration
of Lebanese sovereignty, symbolized by the
disarmament of the militias, as called for in UN
Resolution 1559. But while Washington talks of new
democracies in the region, it blithely ignores the
unanimous votes of the newly elected parliaments
of Iraq and Lebanon condemning Israel.
It
raises a major paradox: if the purpose of 1559 is
to restore sovereignty to Lebanon, then how is
that process served by disarming Hezbollah against
the wishes of the Lebanese people and parliament?
According to a Zogby poll, last year even before
the invasion, Syria was more popular in Lebanon
than the United States was. (Israel had zero
support from any Lebanese, even the Maronites, who
look to the "Christian" US to back them.)
If the Israeli action impels the Lebanese
government to "nationalize" Hezbollah's armed
wing, and nominally incorporate it into the
Lebanese armed forces, then where does that leave
1559?
Apart from the question of what the
international force will do is the even more vexed
question of who will do whatever. The bombing of
the UN post at Khiyam was a hint to potential
troop contributors as to what they can expect.
Even now, some people in the Israeli army, who may
not have taken Olmert into their confidence, do
not want a UN force with teeth, possibly because
they still cherish illusions of following in the
bloody footsteps Ariel Sharon left on the road to
Beirut in 1982.
If they want to avert the
prospects of a new Khiyam, any countries joining a
multinational force should get cast-iron
guarantees from the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and the US on protection for the
force - including anti-aircraft capability.
The French, the most enthusiastic
proponents of the force, seem to be implying that
it will indeed be strongly armed, with armor and
artillery, which raises the interesting question:
In the event of shooting between Israeli and
UN/multinational forces, which side will the
United States be on? And the prospect of German
troops firing on Israel may be a little too
historically ironic for any of the parties to
contemplate.
It is clear that insofar as
there is a solution, the UN is at the core of it,
and for that to succeed the US must be behind the
solution, rather than behind Israel. That is a lot
to ask of any US administration with mid-term
elections in the offing, and even more so of one
that seems to have shared the delusions that have
led Olmert to disaster. Maybe Washington will
eventually begin to listen to its "other" allies.
Ian Williams is author of
Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families,
Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
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