The Blue Voice

«Home | Next: Godless atheistic liberal judges strike again»

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Update on the Israel-Lebanon War

Israel is telling Condi-Condi, our sad excuse for a chief diplomat, that they need another two week or so to carry on war in Lebanon unhindered. (Olmert comunica a Rice que Israel necesita de 10 a 14 días más de ataques en el Líbano El Mundo 30.07.06).

A new attack by Israel has dramatized the lethality of the violence there: 34 Youths Among 56 Dead in Israeli Strike by Kathy Gannon AP/SFGate.com 07/30/06.

At least 56 people, more than half children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that crushed a building, the deadliest attack of the campaign against Hezbollah. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to return early to Washington with her diplomatic mission derailed after Lebanese leaders told her not to come.

Lebanon's prime minister said his country would not talk to the Americans over anything but an unconditional cease-fire. Rice, in Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials, said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life" but stopped short of calling for an immediate end to the hostilities.

However, she made one of her strongest statements yet saying: "We want a cease-fire as soon as possible." Before news of the strike emerged, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Rice that Israel would likely fight on for another 10 to 14 days.

Since the Bush administration has take a hands-off policy toward all the contentious issues between Israel and its neighbors, they essentially have little option at this point than to continue supporting whatever the government of Israel wants. This is not the position in which the United States should have found itself at a time when we have 130,000 or so troops in Iraq (and the number is increasing) in a losing war against an insurgency and in the middle of a civil war that is quickly escalating.

I can believe that Condi-Condi may have had some heartfelt horror at hearing that dozens of children had been killed in this one strike. She is an African-American native of Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1963 church bombing in which three little girls were killed by a Klan bomb must have at least flickered across her cold heart when she heard about this.

The El Mundo report on the "avalanche of condemnation" over this incident even included Condi-Condi's statement among them (Avalancha de condenas al ataque israelí a Qana El Mundo 30.07.06).

In Spain, a spokesperson for the governing Socialist Party reaffirmed Israel's right to legitimate self-defense, but condemned their bombing campaign against Lebanon as "brutal", "indiscriminate" and "disproportional". Austria Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who is also serving as the EU Commissioner for External Relations (not to be confused with Javier Solana, the Special Representative for External Relations) called for an immediate cease-fire and called Israel bombing campaign "unjustifiable".

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose country just a few days ago the administration supporters were holding up a chief example of anti-Hizbullah Sunnis, called the bombing strike "irresponsible" and also called for an immediate ceasefire. Jordan, who had been another member of that group, responded with a statement by King Abdallah II, "El rey condena enérgicamente el feo crimen cometido por el Ejército israelí que mató a muchos civiles libaneses, en su mayoría niños y mujeres". [The king energetically condemns the ugly crime committed by the Israeli armed forces that killed many Lebanese civilians, the majority of them children and women".]

The San Francisco Chronicle has been doing some surprisingly good reporting on the Israel-Lebanon War, and also on the Iraq War. Sunday's offerings from Chronicle reporters are a mixed bag. Marc Sandalow has a good piece on how Bush's Middle East policy is showing itself up as, well, a pitiful failure: Bush aims to expel tyranny by Marc Sandalow San Francisco Chronicle 07/30/06.

The stakes for the American president could hardly be higher. After six years of scorn from internationalists and most global audiences, Bush will emerge from the crisis either trumpeting the demise of one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups or having to explain how a presidency dedicated to making the world safer has done so little to advance the cause of peace. Perhaps both, in some degree.

The exasperated expression on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's face in Rome last week after failing to negotiate an agreement struck only the administration's most ardent supporters as a sign of the world's intransigence. To most everyone else it was a sign of the Bush administration's diplomatic ineptitude.

The invasion of Iraq scarcely has scarcely become a catalyst for peaceful development and movement toward Middle Eastern democracy that Bush had proclaimed, as Sandalow points out. I would emphasize, though, that despite the vague, broad claims, that the Congressional war resolution of October 2002 established two wars aims: (1) dealing with Iraq's (nonexistent) WMDs and (2) responding to any connection between Iraq, Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. And the prewar propaganda focused very heavily on the WMD "threat", with the connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11 mostly insinuated heavily rather than asserted directly.

It's important to recognize that some of the broader strategic claims for the Iraq War have proven false. But it's also very important to remember what the official aims of the war were, and that the Cheney-Bush administration violated the terms of the 2002 war resolution by going to war in Iraq the way it did.

The Cheney-Bush administration's ability to play a constructive role in the current crisis has been drastically reducted by the policies of the previous years:

"The American capacity to influence events in Israel has been going down steadily over the last several years," said Zbigniew Brzezinksi, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. "It's very difficult to see much effect over the last two weeks for whatever steps we have been taking or for whatever we have been saying on this subject."

And as the violence flares from Beirut to Baghdad - two cities about as far apart as San Francisco and Portland - it is getting harder and harder to dismiss the tens of thousands of deaths as bumps on the road to a lasting settlement. The most recent bloodshed has undermined Bush's assertion that democracy of the sort that fosters peace is sweeping through the region.

Unfortunately for us all, Sandalow's analysis is probably correct when he concludes:

In a major address in 2004 on his vision for Middle East democracy, Bush said "as long as that region is a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will produce men and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends.''

Sadly, what is happening today seems likely to contribute despair and anger for years to come, frustrating Bush's hopes for stability.

A couple of other articles in today's Chronicle, though, struck me as a bit strange. Anna Badkhen has a page-one news analysis of Rogue states within states San Francisco Chronicle 07/30/06 that struck me as, at best, downright muddled. Because she uses the term "nonstate actor" to apply to groups as diverse as: the model transnational terrorist network Al Qaida with worldwide aims (however grandiose and crackpot those may be); Hamas which is pretty much exclusively focused on Israel and Palestine; Lebanese Hizbullah which has international connections for sure but is primarily a political and militia group for Shi'a Muslims in Lebanon; Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LET) that attacks Indian targets but is focused on the Kashmir conflict; and, the Afghan Taliban, which is an extreme Pashtun Islamic group that seems to be concentrating on returning to national power in Afghanistan.

My little internal alarm that flashes "new Republican Party line alert" went off when I saw this paragraph:

Although it has members in the Lebanese parliament and Cabinet, Hezbollah draws most of its support from Iran and Syria, two countries that are hostile to Israel, and that have hinted they may enter the conflict if Israel's campaign extends closer to Syria.

Israel's attacks on Hezbollah, which is tightly embedded within sectors of Lebanon's population, cause civilian deaths and destruction, driving the affected people further into the arms of Hezbollah, warned Marina Ottaway, an expert on nonstate actors at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"This is a really vicious circle," Ottaway said. "These periods of open conflict and open violence weaken the moderates ... and strengthen the radicals."

There have been exceptions. In less than two months of intensive air raids in 2001, the United States - which was using a nonstate actor, the rebel Northern Alliance, as its infantry - destroyed al Qaeda's training camps in southern Afghanistan and deposed the hard-line Taliban regime, which harbored the group. The majority of Afghans supported the U.S. campaign.

Ottaway's comment focuses on the political dynamic of guerrilla operations, but her quotation clearly emphasizes the Lebanese aims of Hizbullah. (The Carnegie Endowment does list "non-governmental actors" as one of Ottaway's areas of specialization.)

But the following comment about the Northern Alliance is what really caught my attention. Hizbullah's distinction as a "non-state actor" in Lebanon is that it is in part a Shi'a militia whose military operates independently of Lebanon's weak central government (which has been weakened far more by Israel in the current war). Hizbullah has not tried to seize national power for itself.

The Northern Alliance was a rebel group that aimed to return to power in Kabul after being outsted years before by the Taliban. It doesn't make much conceptual sense to me to lump a transnational group like Al Qaida together with a sectarian party and militia like Hizbullah whose ambitions are centered in one geographic part of a country. Much less to define any rebel group as a "non-state actor" of the same generic nature of Al Qaida. The concept become so vague as to be virtually meaningless. I mean, Hizbullah and Hamas actually participate in elections and are part of the government in their respective areas (although Hizbullah holds just one ministry in the Lebanese government) so they can't be said to be exclusively "non-state" entities.

But such a fuzzy conceptual notion does make sense for someone who would like to conflate Hizbullah with Al Qaida, and the support of Syria and Iran for Hizbullah to the sanctuary the Taliban government gave to Al Qaida in Afghanistan.

So this is one to keep an eye on as we hear from Iran hawks and Syria hawks over the coming weeks and months, i.e., "non-state actors"=The Terrorists=Al Qaida=enemies of America=the need to make war on Iran and/or Syria. Hey, it's no kookier than making up "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq being manufactured by hydrogen-gas trucks of death to be delivered to the American mainland by plywood drones of death. And we went to war over that.

Finally, there is a very odd article by Matthew Kalman, the reporter who broke the important story of a few days ago about Israel's war planning for the current Lebanese war. It's called Under Olmert, Israel putting new emphasis on diplomacy San Francisco Chronicle 07/30/06. No, the headline writer didn't use too much imagination on this one. Kalman's article presents the case that Israel is putting a new emphasis on peaceful diplomacy under the Olmert government and that Israel is lees isolated diplomatically on the Israel-Lebanon War than in many previous military crises.

Frankly, I think Kalman got pulled into playing stenographer for a spin from the Israeli Foreign Ministry that says Israel is widely perceived as cautious and peace-loving in this crisis, or something along those lines. Here's an example:

"There is an understanding today that our national goals seeking security in Lebanon do in fact complement completely the stated position of the international community," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. "As a result, we can use our diplomacy in a very effective way to bring about changes that are positive."

Regev said it helps that Israel is merely seeking to enforce agreed-on policies: "Israel is saying to the international community, 'Implement your own resolutions.' "

"There is broad international agreement, as expressed in the G-8 statement, that Hezbollah is responsible for the current crisis," Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told a small group of reporters in Jerusalem last weekend. "There is also broad international agreement on the nature of the threat -- that it is a regional threat connected to an axis comprising Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Hamas. There is agreement that our soldiers should be released unconditionally and U.N. Security Council resolution 1559 be implemented."

She added, "This is a test, not just for Israel, but for the international community."

Now, what is missing from this perspective? Oh, yeah, the fact that pretty much only the United States and Britain are supporting Israel's particular position on the Israel-Lebanon War. Kalman does mention that fact in the third and fourth paragraphs. But he presents it as a sign of Israel's positive image in this situation. I'm not kidding:

So far, Britain and the United States have blocked calls for an immediate cease-fire, allowing Israel's military campaign to continue. Last week, in fact, much of the international criticism for blocking a call for an immediate cessation was aimed at President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, not at Israel.

"We learned the lessons of losing international support during the intifada," said one ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, referring to the Palestinian uprising that ended last year. "The world agrees with us in the war on terror, and we have learned that we cannot achieve our security imperatives on our own. We need to build international coalitions." (my emphasis)

Kalman quotes a statement by former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer that its fair to say is misleading out of context. Obviously, Kalman neglected to read my own analysis of Fischer's column. :) :)

In the very last two paragraphs of the article, we get a somewhat more sensible opinion. But even then, he quotes his subject talking about what seems to be prewar diplomacy, whereas the article focuses mostly on the diplomacy since the Hizbullah raid of July 12, the starting point of the current war with Lebanon:

Not everyone is convinced that diplomacy has come to the fore. Daniel Levy, an aide in the Barak government who is now director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and Century Foundation, chided Israel's diplomats "for failing to devise a diplomatic offensive that could have encouraged a new reality in southern Lebanon."

He called the years since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon "a gargantuan missed opportunity for Israeli diplomacy. Why did Israel not initiate a public overture - offering Lebanese prisoners in return for certain steps in the south, for instance, or make this a priority talking point with the U.S. or international community?"

posted at 2:55:00 PM by Bruce Miller

| +Save/Share | |