The Osterley Times: The bonfire of the neo-con Vanities

Game, set and match to Hizbullah.

I've been saying for weeks now that Bush should shit or get off the pot. Last night the little turd slunk off the pot.

And for all the death and destruction, for all the claims that carnage had to rage in order to ensure "the birth of a new Middle East", Bush has conceded on almost every single point.

The Israelis will withdraw as Lebanese and UN forces move in.

There will be a full cessation of hostilities based on the 'immediate' end of attacks and offensive military operations by both Hezbollah and Israel upon adoption of the text.

The deployment is not placed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows use of force to fulfil a mandate and self-protection of peacekeepers. Beirut objected to Chapter 7.

The UN secretary-general has 30 days to develop proposals for the delineation of borders of Lebanon, especially in disputed areas, including the Shebaa farms area.

Ehud Olmert, who should really be spending his time more fruitfully writing his resignation letter, has said that Israel will continue to attack Hizbullah, "continuing forward at full power."

This is despite the fact that he has let it be known that he intends to ask the Cabinet to approve the ceasefire on Sunday morning. From the outset of this war he has never missed an opportunity to make a totally pointless gesture, and he is obviously loathe to miss this final chance to needlessly take the risk of killing an innocent.

Israel's defeat is manifest in every line of this resolution. Olmert, who recently made the insane claim that he planned to march his troops all the way to the Litani River, despite finding it difficult to operate his troops one and a half miles inside Lebanon, has now conceded to the inevitable.

I said yesterday that Bush and the neo-cons, by goading Israel on, had led her to be less secure than at any time Yom Kippur. Today that theme is picked up by Yoel Marcus in Ha'aretz:

Then and now, our chiefs of staff responded with bravado and excessive self-confidence. On the first day of the Yom Kippur War, then chief of staff David Elazar told a room full of journalists: "We'll break their bones." The current chief of staff, Dan Halutz, responded to the Hezbollah kidnapping with a threat to "set Lebanon back 20 years." In both cases, the attackers inflicted a heavy blow on Israel. Syria and Egypt killed Israeli soldiers on both fronts, and Hezbollah has inflicted terrible damage on the home front with its mortars and Katyushas - primitive as far as arms go, but lethal to old people, women and children.

In both cases, Israel was taken by surprise and fell victim to what became known as "The Conception" - in a nutshell, the belief that "they wouldn't dare."

The theory in 1973 was that Egypt wanted to invade but couldn't cross the Suez Canal and breach the Bar-Lev line. But it did, in a big way, surprising us in the bargain. All the confidence that we could hold them back and defeat them on their side of the canal went up in a puff of smoke. The chief of staff made a similar mistake today, in going to war rather than just retaliating. In hindsight, it appears that this was just the opportunity Hezbollah was waiting for - laying a trap for the Israel Defense Forces that would then provide Hezbollah with an excuse to attack the Israeli home front.

What has actually been defeated in southern Lebanon is the insane neo-con belief that reality will be what they say it is, based on the sheer dint of their military superiority.

More worryingly, Israel's supposed invincibility, the very thing that has kept her safe from attack for 33 years, has been exposed as a falsehood. It is no exaggeration to say that Bush and the neo-cons, through their foolish goading of Israel to greater and greater excess, have only succeeded in making her more vulnerable than she has been in 33 years.

Douglas Hurd in yesterday's Independent came up with a suggestion:

The US and her allies, under the aegis of the UN, could summon all the parties to an uncomfortable US air force base somewhere in the mid-west.

They could present the parties not with a procedure or a road map but with a comprehensive plan for a final two- state settlement in Palestine, the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, the disarming of Hizbollah and a guarantee of Israel's security. They could muster all the available pressures to get the parties to sign, negotiating as few adjustments as proved necessary.

It might not work, but the other prospects are not promising - and that is how in 1995 they ended the war in Bosnia.

This would guarantee the survival of Israel and return the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians, coupled with a recognition of Israel by every Arab state. It would at least lend some purpose to this disastrous conflict, by defining the moment when Israel finally conceded that it can't hold on to the territories.

For other than an outcome along those lines, what are we to make of this insane war?

Gilad Shalit and the other two Israelis are still kidnapped, Beirut is in ruins. Israel has destroyed hospitals, roads, airports, oil depots, petrol stations, aqueducts, the damage goes into billions. More than a thousand innocent Lebanese have been killed. 100 Israelis are dead.

And for what? For what? We find ourselves exactly where we were when this conflict began.

Israel will now have to exchange prisoners in order to free it's young kidnapped soldiers. The very offer that was on the table on day one.

It would be hard to imagine a war more pointless than the one Ehud Olmert has just engaged in. He should resign.

For the damage has not just been done to Lebanon, the damage to Israel's reputation will take years to mend. She embarked on a cruel campaign in which she appeared to be attempting to collectively punish the Lebanese people for the crimes of Hizbullah. It was, from start to finish, a disgraceful mission. Made all the more ignominious by it's total and abject failure.

But we must never forget who's hand was behind this. Bush and the neo-cons goaded Israel, going as far as to request that they invaded Syria, such was their longing for a wider conflict.

It is Bush and the neo-con mindset that has been defeated here. And that's not hyperbole, Bush himself let it be known that a defeat for Israel would be a terrible defeat in the war on terror.

Well, defeat it is. The vanities of the chickenhawks are ablaze, a bonfire I'd happily put out by urinating on them.