The Osterley Times: UN deal may come too late to end fighting as obstacles to truce continue to mount

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

UN deal may come too late to end fighting as obstacles to truce continue to mount

There is a real danger that the Bush/Blair camps have left their quest for a UN resolution far too late and that it will now fall on deaf ears.

How can Olmert agree to a ceasefire after four weeks of fighting when he has nothing to show for it in terms of success?

Why should Hizbullah agree to a biased US/UN resolution that implies an Israeli victory that even the Israelis can't pretend exists?

How things have changed. It was only a few weeks ago that Siniora was begging for a ceasefire and the US were showing belligerence. Now Bush is demanding a ceasefire while Siniora is refusing to accept one on the terms that Bush is asking for.

"It does not look good," one European diplomat said. "There is nobody interested in stopping now. Hizbullah has no reason to stop. The discrepancy between what is being discussed at the diplomatic table and what is happening on the ground is terrible."

They fear the draft resolution may have come too late. There is concern it is too weighted towards Israel and risks destabilising Lebanon's moderate government.

The problem now is that the Israelis have lost and the US are unwilling or unable to accept that loss. As I said yesterday, the decision that must come from this reality goes to the heart of the neo-con philosophy. Either you do the obvious, and accept a resolution that implies that loss, or you widen the conflict.

Nadim Shehadi, a specialist on Lebanon at the thinktank, Chatham House, was pessimistic. His estimate was that the draft resolution had a "less than 50% chance of success".
He said the resolution offered a chance to contain the conflict locally but that might be too late. The danger was of a wider regional engagement of Syria and Iran. In that case the Bush administration had two choices: make a deal with Syria, which would be a high price to pay, or go to war.
"If the US says 'we do not have the stomach [to make a deal] and do not accept defeat', then probably you have a regional military escalation," he said.
"If there was an attack on Syria, it will involve Iran because they have a pact. It means Iraq goes up in smoke. Everything in Iraq could look like a warm-up if Iran manages to set off a Shia rising. You would have the British army in a Zulu situation."
He said Iran had been playing chess while the US has been playing poker. "The Americans have been bluffing, saying 'we are going to attack you'. Either you are bluffing or not. It is time to show the cards," Mr Shehadi said.

Bush is now demanding a ceasefire, saying, "I understand both parties aren't going to agree with all aspects of the resolution." After so many weeks of inaction, there's a tone of desperation to his pleas. "The Decider" has decided war will end here and he's decided that Israel have won. But the rest of the world is not ready to play his game.

What to do?

The bluffer has come to his Waterloo. It's time to shit or get off the pot.

Sure, Bush can force the resolution through the UN, but his biased pro-Israeli resolution has almost no chance of seriously having any effect on the ground.

Israel responded to this new reality with more ferocious attacks.

Israel inflicted one of its deadliest attacks on Beirut last night when an air strike on a southern district killed at least 15 people, just hours after the departure of a delegation from the Arab League.
At least 30 were injured in the strike, which capped another day of violence in Lebanon in which more than 50 people died, including three Israeli soldiers.
As night fell, Israel declared a curfew in southern Lebanon, warning that all vehicles apart from humanitarian traffic would be at risk. Ground forces continued to run into fierce resistance in southern Lebanon. Hizbullah militants fired more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, wounding at least one.

Olmert is continuing to inflict damage to Lebanon in an attempt to deliver some sort of result that the Israeli public will find acceptable after four weeks of fighting. Understandably, the Israeli public - having spent four weeks in bomb shelters - expect some sort of decisive victory, the problem is that Olmert has been unable to deliver it. He is now heading for the defeat that most people predicted he was heading for at the start of this conflict.

The Lebanese government have offered to employ it's own forces in the south to facilitate an Israeli withdrawal. It's the nearest thing to an olive branch that exists on Bush's horizon.

He should grab it. The alternative is a wider Middle East war, with the US almost certainly being ejected from Iraq in ignominy.

This is not the time for Bush's infamous arrogance, it is time for him to practice pragmatism. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Is Bush even capable of taking such a pragmatic stance? I really have no idea, and nothing in his past behaviour suggests so. However, grim reality has a way of separating wheat from chaff.

We are about to discover just how insane "the Decider" really is. Or whether he was all along simply emulating Nixon's madman theory? Either way, he's lost. The important question for all of us though, is whether or not he is willing to accept defeat.