Nasrallah: 'Serious' negotiations underway on fate of IDF soldiers

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said that he is negotiating with Israel over the release of two soldiers.

This is the negotiation Israel said she would never make, and Israel's refusal to negotiate was her justification for the war in Lebanon. Opponents of that war, like myself, always said the day would come when Israel would negotiate and that, on that day, we would have the right to question why so much death and destruction was inflicted upon the Lebanese when a negotiated settlement was always going to be the solution to the crisis.

Today the Israelis refuse to confirm that they are even talking to Hizbullah, I would hope out of a deep sense of shame and embarrassment at the loss of life they needlessly inflicted on Lebanon, but I know I'm being fanciful to imagine that Olmert experiences any such regrets.

Indeed, the fact that Nasrallah is continuing to boast about Israel's inability to disarm Hizbullah only further points to the abject failure that the war was in terms of military success and, more importantly, on Israel's reputation as a superpower in the region.

Nasrallah also said during the interview that United Nations Forces in Lebanon would not be able to disarm the guerilla group.

"The assembly of UNIFIL forces does not hint to anything that should inspire fear. This is not an ensemble with a goal of disarming us, nor would they be able to do so," he said, in his first appearance since speaking at "victory" rally in south Beirut last month.

Nasrallah said the countries that had sent forces to Lebanon had established contact with the Hezbollah before deciding to deploy their troops. "We told them that we have no problem with them coming to help the [Lebanese] army," he said.

The Hezbollah leader also said that Israel had been defeated in the recent war, and would have to "think a thousand times" before starting another war in Lebanon. He said the guerilla group had well prepared itself over the last six years for a war of siege with Israel. "We had more than 33,000 missiles," he said, adding, "and what we had is still in our possession.

He went on to say that the US would leave the region in defeat:

"Afghanistan is a failure ... In Iraq, there is clear failure on the security, military and political levels ... Who shoulders responsibility? It's the American administration and the occupation forces in control of the situation," Nasrallah said in a taped interview on Hezbollah's television station Al-Manar.

He said America's plans in the Middle East face "failure, frustration and a state of collapse," and predicted the U.S. would be forced to leave the region in the future - just like it left Vietnam after the war there three decades ago.

The U.S. has "no future" in the region, Nasrallah said. "They will leave the Mideast, Arab and Islamic worlds just as they left Vietnam, and I advise those who are counting on them to draw conclusion from the Vietnam
experience."

This would happen "within years, not months," he added.

Personally, I am pleased that the young Israeli soldiers may soon be returned to their families. I hope the same will soon happen to young Gilad Shalit.

The tragedy is that Olmert, spurred on by Bush and the neo-cons, waged a hopeless war that caused billions of dollars worth of damage to Beirut and southern Lebanon. It was a war in which Israel sought to punish a civilian population for the crimes of Hizbullah, a form of collective punishment that constituted a war crime.

The Israeli attacks on Lebanon actually illustrated the failed policy of Bush and his cohorts more clearly than even the Iraq war has done. It is their overwhelming belief in military power, their lack of empathy for any civilians whose lives are lost in the process, their unbending belief that their cause is right and that this supersedes any amount of casualties that wars fought on their ideological battleground causes.

We are dealing here with ideologues. Dangerous, dangerous people.

The most shocking thing about Israel's intervention into Lebanon has been the lack of shame that it's practitioners have displayed since the war ended. They now enter into negotiations that were always open to them, and they do so without expressing any hint of regret that so many needlessly died because they chose to fight rather than to negotiate.

Indeed, as I reported yesterday, John Bolton continues to look for ways to escalate and restart the conflict.

There are madmen at the heart of this American administration. People who believe that violence is the answer to every problem.

And even when their violence yields them no results, they simply prepare - as Bolton is proving by his every utterance - to launch yet another violent assault.

When will the American public see these men as they actually are and eject them from office? When will conservatives realise that their party has been overtaken by these ideologues and eject them from their party in the same way the British Labour Party had to eject Militant in the 1980's?

Until they do, there will only be more of this madness, because these people are truly without shame.

Click title for full article.

tag: Lebanon, Gilad Shalit, Israel, Hizbullah, Nasrallah, negotiations, talks, prisoner swap, John Bolton, Bush, neo-Cons, Olmert,