Ceasefire, or quagmire by another
name By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
After a month of standing by, while
Lebanon was reduced to an "accumulation of
rubbles", to paraphrase Walter Benjamin's
description of history, the United Nations has
adopted a so-called ceasefire resolution that may
bring a temporary respite from the fighting
followed, ironically, by a whole new chapter in
the war - by internationalizing it.
UN
Resolution 1701, adopted unanimously on Friday,
calls for Israel's withdrawal "at the earliest"
and not immediately, as demanded by Hezbollah,
which has rejected several key aspects of this
resolution, insisting that as long as Israel
remains in Lebanon the fighting will go on.
Ironically, since the resolution's
adoption, Israel has committed its largest
incursion inside Lebanon, up to the Litani River, the
justification being "in order
to protect the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]
soldiers", to paraphrase Israeli Foreign Minister
Tzipi Livni. But in light of the heavy fighting
and mounting IDF casualties after the massive
invasion of Lebanon, Livni's logic leaves a lot to
be desired. The ceasefire was to go into effect on
Monday.
Israel has yet to implement the
UN's call in 1967 under Resolution 242 for
"withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from
territories occupied in the recent conflict". In
comparison, Resolution 1701 is more vague and
indeterminate, as Israel can perpetuate its prized
conquests in south Lebanon indefinitely with one
excuse or another, as can be already discerned
from Livni's press statement, that Israel will
only withdraw when a robust international force
arrives, together with Lebanese forces, and that
the arrival of "a few Lebanese soldiers" will not
suffice. But waiting for the "international force"
may prove to be "waiting for the Godot".
On a related note, in his latest article
in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has written that
the US government was in collaboration with Israel
on the air campaign against Hezbollah, even prior
to the July 12 border incident that set off the
war. Their aim was to destroy Hezbollah's military
infrastructure as a prelude for a future attack on
Iran.
Their failed expectations, giving
rise to a severe crisis of confidence on Israel's
army within Israel today, portending a coming
political crisis, might have also affected the
Bush administration, had the latter not benefited
enormously from the foiled terror plot in London.
But the wounds of President George W
Bush's presidency run deeper than can be bandaged
by such good news on the "war on terror" front,
which may turn out to be exaggerated - given the
shocked reaction of some of the apprehended
suspects and the contradictory news surrounding
this plot, eg, Pakistan's initial report of arrest
of some plotters several days prior to the London
raid, subsequently revised to make it
"simultaneous". Given the poor reputation of Bush
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their
prior lies on the Iraq war, one must keep a
healthy dose of skepticism until all the facts are
crystal clear.
New role for the UN
peacekeeping force Per the new resolution,
the UN peacekeeping operation in Lebanon (United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon - UNIFIL) has
been given a new mission with an expanded scope to
assist the Lebanese army to "exercise authority"
throughout Lebanon. Potentially, the stage has
been set for a new phase in the Lebanese theater
of conflict, with the US and Israel hoping that
the Lebanese army, backed by the UN, can now
finish the job they have failed to achieve
themselves, that is, to defang Hezbollah.
Thus the double-edged-sword potential of
Resolution 1701: it can induce peace as much as it
may prove a catalyst for a future civil war in
Lebanon, pitting the Lebanese army against
Hezbollah.
Deputy IDF chief of staff
Major-General Moshe Kaplinsky was quoted in US
media on the weekend as saying that there was a
chance that the IDF would begin withdrawing from
Lebanon by the end of this week after the arrival
of the multinational force. Several factors,
however, militate against the fragile ceasefire,
including the possibility of Hezbollah's
rearmament, much dreaded by Israel.
The
resolution also calls on the UN secretary general
to take the appropriate measures to make sure
UNIFIL's new role is fully implemented in Lebanon.
Easier said than done, because of the following:
first, the UN is at present "stretched very thin"
in terms of money and resources for its far-flung
peacekeeping operations, swallowing up to half of
the UN's budget annually, per a recent interview
of Kofi Annan's assistant for policy planning,
Robert Orr, with this author. [1]
Second,
the UN is already suffering a major image problem
in the Muslim and developing worlds as a
superpower pawn, which will be augmented if it
turns out that its peacekeepers in Lebanon are
doing Israel's "dirty job" of trying to disarm a
popular group successfully standing up to the
mighty Israeli army, indeed an unprecedented
achievement in the annals of Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Third, as Gideon Levy put it in
the liberal Israeli paper Ha'aretz, Israel's
spectacular failure in Lebanon may not be such a
bad thing, as it makes Israel think twice about
any future "military adventurism".
And yet
if the UN now commits itself to enter into action
practically on Israel's side, seeing how the
resolution calls for Hezbollah's disarmament and
the "unconditional release" of two Israeli
soldiers without calling for a quid pro quo
prisoner exchange, it is bound to suffer
grievously in the realm of its global perceptions,
a potential setback it can ill afford right now.
Fourth, it remains to be seen which
countries will volunteer forces to the UN mission
in Lebanon - Javier Solana, the European Union's
foreign-policy chief, has promised a "robust" EU
contribution. Yet this may be wishful thinking, as
the EU countries, variously grappling with the
blowback of home-grown Muslim terrorism as a
result of their bandwagoning with the US and
Israel, may think twice before committing their
troops to harm's way in south Lebanon.
Consequently, the chances are good to
excellent that a viable international force to
implement Resolution 1701's laundry list of
objectives will not materialize any time soon, and
this will, in turn, translate into Israel's
continuous occupation of South Lebanon.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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