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Doomed diplomacy
Rice's efforts won't succeed if the US concerns itself only with Israel's security. This is not entirely her fault. She is the servant of a profoundly misguided US foreign policy.
- By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 July 28, 2006
Having ignored the war for two weeks, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has, at last, visited Lebanon and Israel, and attended a meeting of the Lebanon contact group in Rome. Regrettably, at all these stops she has done almost everything wrong. This is not entirely her fault. She is the servant of a profoundly misguided American foreign policy.
Her first and most important mistake was not to insist on an immediate ceasefire. She is waiting, she says, for conditions to be "conducive". A ceasefire would be pointless, she argues, if it merely restored the status quo ante of an Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation. Her aim, she explained, was to bring about a fundamental improvement in Israel's environment to create a "new, democratic Middle East". This, of course, is pure Israel-speak and pure fantasy.
So long as the US concerns itself only with Israel's security and ignores the interests of the Arab parties to the conflict, Rice's efforts will be doomed to failure.
Her second mistake was her failure to invite Hezbollah, Syria and Iran to the Rome meeting. How could she hope to strike a deal if the parties on one side of the conflict were absent? (Israel was also absent, but its interests were amply represented by the United States.) The answer is that Rice has no interest in striking a deal or mediating a settlement. She wants to impose terms on Israel's enemies or allow Israel to do so.
Nothing better illustrates the fundamental contradictions of US policy than the fact that it is rushing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of precision bombs and aviation fuel to Israel, while at the same time sending the stricken Lebanese population $30 million of humanitarian aid!
In Beirut, Rice shed crocodile tears over the death of more than 350 Lebanese, mainly civilians, the wounding of thousands more and the forcible displacement from their shattered villages and homes of a further 700,000 or 800,000. In Israel, she did not demur when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to continue his murderous onslaught. That alone condemns her in the eyes of much of the world.
Rice's declared goals are to secure the release of the two captured Israeli soldiers, disarm Hezbollah and force it back some 20 kilometres from the Israel border and put in place an international force to prevent any further rocket attacks against Israel. These are unrealistic objectives, because they give Hezbollah and its backers no reason to comply.
Rice might have been more successful if her goals had been more balanced. For example, she could have a) called for a truce, that is to say a suspension of military operations by both sides, to allow help to reach the hard-pressed Lebanese population; b) insisted on an exchange of prisoners (including some Lebanese prisoners who have been held in Israeli jails for nearly 30 years); c) required Hezbollah to withdraw from the immediate border area in exchange for an Israel withdrawal from the Sheba'a Farms (an enclave of Lebanese territory occupied in 1967). These moves could have laid the groundwork for a more permanent ceasefire.
Rice's third mistake was her attempt to rustle up an international force to disarm Hezbollah. This is an absurdity. If a peace-keeping force is deployed solely to protect Israel, it will immediately be attacked by Hezbollah. No state would wish to expose its troops in this way.
If, however, the proposed international force is given a peace-enforcement mandate, and not a mere peace-keeping one, it will need to have the capability to deter Israel as well as Hezbollah. Would it be able to prevent Israeli incursions, kidnappings and targeted assassinations, as have happened so often in the past? Would it hunt down the scores of Israeli agents in Lebanon, such as the assassination cell which was recently uncovered by the Lebanese authorities and charged with several murders?
Would it be able to shoot down Israeli aircraft flying over Lebanon on reconnaissance or combat missions, as they have done on a regular basis for much of the past 40 years? If the answer is no to these questions, then the idea of an international force had better be abandoned.
Rice is in the unfortunate position of having inherited a deeply-flawed US policy. She does not seem to have the understanding, the authority or the inclination to change course.
She says she wants to secure implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. But what of Security Council Resolution 242 passed after the 1967 war, which proclaimed the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war? Most of the regions current problems including the anger, violence, armed resistance and terrorism flow from America's failure to ensure the implementation of that Resolution.
Urgently required is an American effort to resolve the various conflicts which plague the Middle East, not simply to paper them over to Israel's advantage.
Rice says that she wants a peace "based on enduring principles and not on temporary solutions". This is an admirable objective provided the principles are the right ones.
- Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.
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