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August 14, 2006
In an op.ed. in The Age Amin Saikal says that the key elements of the UN resolution call for an immediate end to Hezbollah's attacks on Israel and to Israel's offensive military operations in Lebanon, as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force and Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon. The resolution also provides for the disarmament of Hezbollah and a final settlement of the Israeli-Lebanon border area.
Scratch
It's a very hopeful resolution isn't it? Though the move to deploy the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon is a setback for Hezbollah, how will Hezbollah be disarmed. Though Hizbollah is a de facto instrumentality of the Lebanese Government, is disarnament cannot be done by the Lebanese army, nor the Lebanese government, or even the UN. Hezbollah needs to consent to its disarnament does it not?
Whilst watching CNN last night in a hotel room I learnt that, the Lebanese government on Sunday morning had accepted the UN security council resolution. Though Israel indicated that it will abide by the UN resolution, it has nonetheless continued its military operations and broadened its ground offensives to seize territory up to the Litani River, 30 kilometres inside Lebanon.This last minute attempt to gain advantage before hostilities are obliged to cease, means that Hezbollah will not hold back its fire for as long as Israel maintains its offensives. Moreover, I cannot see that a UN peacekeeping force, or for that matter the Lebanese Army, will be able to disarm Hezbollah totally.
Saikal comments that:
Israel's objective is clear. It is to depopulate southern Lebanon, weaken and push back Hezbollah as far north as possible so that its rockets will not reach Israel, and then to allow Israel to make a phased troop withdrawal from a position of strength rather than one that could be viewed, by its own population and by the region, as one of vulnerability. Behind this objective lurks the wider shared Israeli and US aim: to remove Lebanon from Syrian and Iranian influence through Hezbollah, and thus also to redress a strategic imbalance that the Iraqi fiasco has produced in favour of strategically strengthening Iran and Syria in the region.
Israel is continuing to talk up how it is winning this war and chalking up victorious achievements even though there are deep divisions within the Israeli government over the conduct of the war.
Sami Moubayed in Asia Times says that one way to disarm Hizbollah is through Iran.
Only Iran has the ability to disarm Hezbollah with minimal damage to Lebanon and the entire Middle East. Only Iran can command Hezbollah, and only Iran will Hezbollah obey. Yet Iran will only do so if it is given carrots - big carrots - by the US administration. Thus, by seeking a UN resolution, the Americans and the French are actually looking in the wrong direction....If indeed Israel and the US want an end to the war, they should look for answers in Tehran, not at the UN.
I suspect that the Bush administration knew about the planned Israel air attack in advance, gave it the green light, and supported Israel's attempts to diminish Hebollah. This war was of Israel's choosing, long in the planning and preparation. The US supported it to reduce the threat of possible Hizbullah retaliation against Israel should the US launch a military strike against Iran. It is all about Iran for the Bush administration.
Bush sees the enemy as is a "totalitarian ideology" Islamo fascism--- and he sees all violent Muslim opposition to western interests everywhere in the world as part of a single conspiracy, and defines this opposition in terms of an existential enemy of the United States. 'We' are at war with a hydra-headed and barbaric enemy that has not a shred of humanity that is at least as brutal as the Nazis and communist enemies of the past is the talking point.
What is not said by Bush is that Israel is the primary means by which the US has exercised its hegemony over the region and it uses the classic imperial device of divide and rule. Iran challenges that regional hegemony.
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