A Cause for Hope
Though Only A Darned Small One
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The Lebanese army began deploying south of the Litani River, about 20 km (13 miles) from the border with Israel, on Thursday to take over, with the help of an existing U.N. force known as UNIFIL, a region it has not fully controlled for decades.
Despite the profound craveness of the French there is a tiny glimmer of hope that the ceasefire in Lebanon is not the abject surrender to terrorists that it appeared at first blush.
Read on.
As the Lebanese Army moves south of the Litani River and into the heart of Hezbollistan there is a hope that it will act as the nation’s Army and rigorously enforce border security. If, and I would say this is a monumental if, it call pull off this task it will have saved Lebanon from destruction. Israel cannot and should not tolerate the presence of people along its borders who conduct raids and artillery strikes against it.
Disarming Hezbollah’s militia of crew-served weapons as well as tube and rocket artillery would bring it, finally, into compliance with UNSC Resolution 1558 and remove a huge stumbling block to Lebanon’s political progress.
Give the unhelpful nature of Lebanese President Lahoud’s characterization of the Hezbollah militia as part of the Lebanese armed forces and the weakness of the Lebanese government this is unlikely. According to Bloomberg:
The Lebanese government put one key restriction on the army's mandate: ``The army is not going to the south to strip Hezbollah of weapons and do the work Israel did not,'' Defense Minister Elias Murr told LBC television…
The rank-and-file of the Lebanese Army is also mostly Shiite Muslim, and unlikely to enforce a withdrawal. ``Officers might not support Hezbollah, but soldiers are sympathetic,'' said Hamzeh, author of the book ``In the Path of Hezbollah.''
And even high-ranking officers would balk at trying to take Hezbollah's weapons, Saad-Ghorayeb said. ``The Lebanese army has never fought an invasion of Lebanon; Hezbollah has,'' she said. ``The generals respect that.'' …
In the end, the cabinet settled on a hide-and-not-seek policy. The weapons must remain out of sight; only the army would be allowed to bear arms. ``There will be no land in Lebanon which is prohibited to the army; there will be no weapons but those of the army,'' said Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. …
Saad-Ghorayeb said that the cabinet wouldn't dare order Hezbollah to give up its weapons. ``Shiites would riot in a second,'' she said. ``It could mean civil war.''
A June 1 Shiite riot might have provided a glimpse of the possibilities, she said. LBC, the Lebanese television network, satirized Nasrallah, who was portrayed by a comic in a black turban as making any excuse to keep his rockets -- citing the need to liberate the garden of someone named Abu Hassan in Detroit.
Shiite mobs rampaged in Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim neighborhoods of Beirut, burned tires and damaged stores. ``Imagine what would happen if the government tried to disarm Hezbollah,'' Saad-Ghorayeb said.
So while we have a brief cause to be hopeful, we should not indulge that hope to any great degree.
The most likely outcome remains a rearmed Hezbollah, flush from its perceived victory over Israel, commingling with some 15,000 sympathetic if not actually complicit Lebanese troops, using the enhanced Son-of-UNIFIL presence as a human shields while they return to their old ways of attacking Israel.
If that happens, the stage is set for another frontier war within the next two years. A war that will directly involve Lebanese troops fighting Israeli troops.
So while we have a brief cause to be hopeful, we should not indulge that hope to any great degree.
We should not indulge that hope at all. Hezbollah has stated clearly that they will not disarm (like we needed them to say that for us to know they won't). Iran and Syria are now working on pouring arms back into Lebannon to rearm Hezbollah. With Israel failing to take Hezbollah out while it had the chance, or seriously degrade it effectiveness to the point that they could no longer fight, the Lebanese army is simply going to be in the area where Hezbollah operates, and are now going to be much more sympathetic to them since Hezbollah "won." When Hezbollah begins firing rockets at Israel again, many more Lebanese troops are going to die when Israel defends itself, and that will push many more Lebanese into the hands of Hezbollah, Lebanese nationism, and hatred of Israel. The Lebanese government is still rife with Hezbollah supporters or shills for Syria, and will not be effective at all in curbing Hezbollah's activities, let alone ever disarming them.
Hezbollah has neatly lined up the Lebanese army as a shield against Israel, one that will have to be battered down once Hezbollah starts firing rockets again. The next round will be far bloodier.
Hoping even a little bit that the current mess is going to some how come out right is futile. There will be open war in the Middle East in the not too distant future. This bungling by Israel of their campaign in Lebanon, along with the West's insistence that it be fought with one arm tied behind their back and that it end before Israel gained a real victory, and the further stupidity of western nations not to deal with the actual problems in the Middle East, is doing nothing more than exacerbating an already volitile situation.
Israel failed to win on the ground, and Hezbollah won the media war. Round two is most certainly coming, and next time it will be far, far worse. This was an opportunity completely wasted by Israel and her allies, and there won't be another one as good next time.
--------------------Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils.--------------------