Israel attempts huge UN bluff.

Okay, so yesterday the Israelis revealed their plan to march into Lebanon and take control of land all the way to the Litani river. I commented on this minutes after it hit the wires and said then that I was unsure of what Olmert was doing, it looked to me like he was making some sort of stance sure that the UN would rein him in. The cabinet have since made a public statement:

"If there is a political settlement in the coming days, we will adjust our operations accordingly," the cabinet said in a statement issued after an intense six-hour session.

I think it's safe to now take this as an attempt to force the Lebanese to accept Bush's biased resolution, with the threat that things could get much worse. As I said yesterday, the death toll amongst the Israelis were Olmert to push ahead with such a plan would almost certainly end his leadership were he not able to stop Hizbullah's rockets from falling.

The White House has now chimed in with Snow asking that neither side "escalate the conflict" which only further convinces me that they are playing Nixon's madman theory and Bush is seeking to act as if Israel is out of control and he's having a hard time reining them in.

This is all an attempt to get the ceasefire on terms that are equitable to Israel.

Gideon Meir, the chief foreign ministry spokesman, said Israel expected the invasion plan would concentrate the minds of the security council: "There is not unlimited time. Israel is exposed to daily shelling. There is an opportunity for the international community to do something it didn't do in the past six years."

It seems clear the Israelis are playing a huge game of bluff here, although the danger in playing such a game is that someone might just call you on it. Then Olmert really would have to put his inflated plan into motion.

This is all because Bush is refusing to accept the Israeli defeat, or at least refusing to accept any UN resolution that is consistent with that defeat. Bush has made it clear that he believes any defeat for Israel in this dispute would be a defeat for the War on Terror. And working as he does on the assumption that reality is what he says it is he is unwilling to bend on this matter. He is also strongly backed on this view by Cheney and Rumsfeld.

It is because of this worldview that Rice is being battered by her own team.

“She’s being hammered by those who believe that this crisis will only be resolved by a strategic victory by Israel, backed by the United States,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under the last three presidents. “That belief says that unless Hezbollah is handed a strategic retreat, the war on terror will suffer a huge defeat.”

So it's against this background that the battle at the UN must be viewed.

However, leaving aside the ideology that drives the Bush administration, reality on the ground tells it's own truths. Yesterday, was the worst day yet for Israel in it's month long battle with Hizbullah with 15 Israeli troops losing their lives and twenty five being wounded.

Meanwhile at the UN, France and the US seem even further apart.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, broke from his holiday to deliver an implicit rebuke to Washington. Mr Chirac warned the Bush administration that an immediate ceasefire was the only solution to the conflict and said giving up on this was "immoral". He urged the US to speed up its response to Arab nations' demands for changes to the ceasefire plan.

"It appears today that the Americans have reservations about adopting this project, but I don't want to imagine there not being a solution." He added: "To accept the present situation and renounce an immediate ceasefire would be the most immoral of solutions."

The difficulty of finding a diplomatic solution was also underscored when Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, in his first comments on the original UN draft, rejected it. "The least we can describe this [draft resolution] is as unfair and unjust. It has given Israel more than it wanted and more than it was looking for," he said.

So the USraelis are taking this to the wire, determined that they will not be the ones to blink first. They are threatening to expand the war unless the world will allow Israel to call it's defeat a victory.

Unfortunately for them, they have backed themselves into a hideous corner. The UN will not back down as Lebanon will not accept the terms of the USraeli resolution.

I've said for the past two days that it's time for Bush to shit or to get off the pot. He's still sitting, but he's not shitting. He just keeps promising that one is on the way.

Time is running out and if the USraelis don't make a move soon, their bluff might just be called. At which point Olmert will be required to advance his troops all the way to the Litani river, with all the loss of life that this would entail.

For men who run country's, these guys are terrible poker players.

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