Hizbullah reject the UN resolution. The war continues.

I said yesterday that I thought the US/Israeli demands in the proposed UN resolution did not reflect the reality on the ground, and were the demands of a victor, a position that we all know does not reflect the true situation in the Middle East. I did, however, suspect that the Lebanese might go for it, as the reality on the ground has changed the power structure in the Middle East forever, removing Israel's ability to attack with impunity from the table.

It would now appear that Hizbullah are not prepared to accept any smudged resolution that appears, as the US and the Israelis want, to imply an Israeli victory. They have rejected it outright saying that nothing short of the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanese soil will be acceptable to them.

Then they showed just how much the resolution departed from the reality on the ground.

Within 24 hours of the draft being agreed, Hizbullah launched a rocket barrage that killed 12 Israeli soldiers. They followed up with the heaviest attack yet on the port city of Haifa, with a volley of missiles flattening buildings and pulling down electrical lines. Three were killed and at least 120 injured. Israel responded stepping up its aerial bombardment, with the port of Tyre bearing the brunt.

Condaleezza Rice attempted to put pressure on the Lebanese by stating:

"We're going to know who really did want to stop the violence and who didn't," she said.

But she's wasting her breath. The reality on the ground is that Israel has not won the war, and the Lebanese are not going to accept any resolution that can be read as if she did.

Lebanon and Hizbullah said the draft offered no timetable for an Israeli troop withdrawal. "If Israel has not won the war, but still gets this, what would have happened had they won?" asked Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament negotiating on behalf of Hizbullah.

Israel said little in public yesterday about the draft, but reports in the press suggested political leaders were happy with the result. Key parts of the agreement were seen to be in Israel's favour.

This now complicates things for the Israelis and the US.

Israel feels she cannot be seen to lose, even though she has not achieved ANY of her war aims and her loss is visible to anyone with a modicum of interest in Middle Eastern politics.

What to do? I have always said that Israel is operating the neo-con policy which states that military superiority will master any enemy and so, true to form, Israel yesterday upped the ante by making threats to Syria and Iran.

In the most explicit threat yet from Israel to Iran, Dan Gillerman, the ambassador to the UN, said in an interview with the BBC that an attack by Hizbullah on Tel Aviv would be tantamount to an "act of war" and Hizbullah would not make such an attack without an explicit order from Iran. The implication of his words was that Israel would retaliate by attacking Tehran.

Now, whilst I have long suspected that Israel's initial war aims were to draw Syria and Iran into a wider dispute, I think that was made on the assumption that Israel could take out and eliminate Hizbullah. It was always a wildly ambitious proposition, but such insanity is at the root of all neo-con thinking, it substitutes desire for facts on the ground and then thinks it can will a change in reality by the sheer force of the belief itself.

This thinking is what is responsible for the situation in Iraq as we speak, and it also behind the lunatic claims that progress is being made.

Now, however, is not the time for such lunacy. Israel may not want to accept the fact that she has lost, but the simple truth is that she has. And no amount of arrogant posturing will change that fact. And nowhere is this arrogant posturing more obvious that in the fact that this resolution is being negotiated by the world's latest colonial power, the United States, and one of the world's old colonial powers, France. I can understand why the United States, as an obvious proxy for Israel, is involved; but where are Syria and Iran in all of this?

Syria and Iran, Hizbullah's main backers in the region, opposed Paris and Washington's terms for a cessation of hostilities.

In a telephone call with Syria's president, Bashar Assad, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the US, "which has been supporting the Zionist regime until today" had "no right to enter the crisis as a mediator". Syria's foreign minister, Walid Moallem, visiting Lebanon, said it was "a recipe for the continuation of the war".

There is a new confidence to Israel and the US's enemies in the Middle East, and their belligerence over this UN resolution merely reflects this. The question now is what the US and Israel plan to do about this.

Neo-con philosophy demands that, rather than accept any hint of defeat, the war should be expanded. However, the reality on the ground, that the US and Israel are so reluctant to publicly acknowledge, demands that they desist and that Israel withdraws her forces.

It's a game of who blinks first. And Hizbullah, Iran and Syria have just let it be known that they are not for blinking.

The world watches as the ball flies right back into the US/Israeli court. Will they blink? For all of our sakes, I hope they will. Although neo-con logic says they won't, I have always argued that southern Lebanon is the ideal place to bury the neo-con way of thinking as the defeated ideology that it is.

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Tags: Olmert, Bush, Blair, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Hizbullah, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, UN resolution,