It is, at best, naïve, for the United States to to be outraged that Israel interpreted the failure of the Rome summit to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East crisis as tacit approval by Washington for it to continue its "shock and awe" devastation of Lebanon. Worse, the Americans are being disingenuous.
Whatever the malady, the good thing is that the Bush administration and its staunchest ally, Mr. Tony Blair, the British premier, appear to be growing sensitive to the concern of the rest of the world. So Mr. Bush has said that his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, is heading back to the Middle East for another round of diplomacy. Further, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair now say that international force should be quickly assembled for southern Lebanon, as a wedge between the Israeli army and the Hezbollah guerrillas and to ensure humanitarian relief to displaced Lebanese.
As we have argued in these columns before, Israel's right to exist, at this stage, is non-negotiable. And it must exist within secure borders. But those borders cannot be ones arbitrarily set by the Israelis, but those recognised by several United Nations resolutions. In other words, Israel has to retreat behind the borders established up to the 1967 war.
This is the only way, in our view, that Israel and its supporters can effectively neutralise backing for, and the fighting strength of organisations such as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. It is also the route to the rebuilding of respect for the United States in the Middle East and the provision for long-term peace and America's honourable extrication from Iraq. For by now, Washington and others must be clear that the Palestinian question has become, wrongly or not, a rallying point for every radical organisation in the Middle East, helping to fuel anti-Americanism in the region.
So while the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah was a provocation, the disproportionate response of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who sent war planes to bomb southern Lebanon into a stone heap, has hardly enhanced his country's security. The ensuing war, with the supposed aim of degrading Hezbollah's capability, has left, so far, 500 Lebanese dead and three quarter million displaced. But perhaps more critically, it has drummed up support in Lebanon for Hezbollah and its Syrian sponsors, who were on the retreat in the face of the Cedar Revolution.
A new reality is emerging in the Middle East which Ms. Rice has to be aware of as she begins her new round of diplomacy. Firstly, the Americans will have to appear far more even-handed, being willing to place pressure on Israel to halt its destruction of Lebanon. An immediate ceasefire in this conflict is not contradictory, as the Americans claim, to disarming and neutralising Hezbollah.
Furthermore, the Americans have to begin to reconfigure their Middle East strategy, including to whom they talk in the Middle East. This isolation of Syria by the Bush administration is ludicrous for it effectively sidelines a key lever of pressure on Hezbollah. Indeed, the longer this conflict goes on the more important Syria becomes to a lasting solution. The Americans also have to find a way to engage Iran, another point of influence on Hezbollah and, perhaps more critically, on events in Iraq.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY RELECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
