Wow, Talk About Getting Here First

[Annie]

She's right, I do wonder how long we're all going to ignore what is whipping around us? (while the current US/France treaty is now tissue paper, some other version of "Peace in Our Times" is forthcoming):

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525826363&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer

Our World: Talkin' about a revolution
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 8, 2006

It is hard to know how the current phase of the war will end. If all goes according to Condoleezza Rice's plan, the UN Security Council will vote today on the draft cease-fire resolution negotiated between the US and France.

Whatever marginal diplomatic gains the Olmert government may try to convince the public the draft resolution contains for Israel, the fact is that regardless of the language eventually adopted, and whatever force of French, Egyptian, Turkish, Italian and German soldiers will or will not be deployed to Lebanon, all any cease-fire resolution will do is ensure that there will be another round of war.

This is the case because none of the moves being considered involve the one action that would prevent the next war. That action is an Israeli victory against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and an Israeli and allied strike against Hizbullah's state sponsors Syria and Iran, which promote Hizbullah's wanton aggression against Israel as a central campaign in their global jihad aimed at annihilating the Jewish state and defeating Western civilization.

In the hours that followed Hizbullah's massive missile barrage against Israel Sunday, which left 15 dead and more than 150 wounded, many voices expressed the hope and expectation that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the IDF General Staff would finally approve a military campaign aimed at destroying Hizbullah's capacity to attack Israel. It was anticipated that they would finally authorize the IDF's plan to advance ground forces to the Litani River and take the necessary measures in Tyre, Sidon and other cities to wipe out Hizbullah's capacity to launch missiles against Israel.

But Olmert would have none of it. In the aftermath of the carnage in Kfar Giladi and Haifa, he continued to maintain that Israel had already won the war, and that the best way to end the conflict was to accept a Security Council resolution that would enable Hizbullah - the advance guard of the Iranian army of jihad - not only to survive as a fighting force, but to declare victory against Israel.

OLMERT TODAY devotes his attention not to addressing the question of how Israel can win this war, but rather to how he can convince the Israeli public that he is not a failure. And he is not alone. Over the past week or so the main push of the Olmert government, the IDF General Staff and the left-wing establishment in Israel has been to prepare the public to accept their version of events.

All three groups have their own specific agenda. But their goal - maintaining their power and evading accountability for their leadership failures - is a shared one.

Olmert and his colleagues are pushing three ideas to advance their claims of competence. First, they claim that Israel has already won the war. They back up this claim by pretending that the draft UN Security Council resolution is a success, and that a multinational force will protect us.

Second, they pretend that the Palestinian jihad against Israel is unrelated to the Lebanese jihad against Israel and that, as a result, their plan to transfer control over Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians remains sound. To this end they continue to support Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas even as he openly praises Hizbullah and his own security forces participate in terrorist attacks against Israelis. Moreover, they ignore the fact that Hizbullah terrorist-in-chief Hassan Nasrallah is the most popular figure in Palestinian society.

Finally, by preventing the ground offensive that all those IDF reserve divisions were called up to execute, they continue to pretend that the control of territory is unnecessary for national defense. After all, what is an air-based strategy other than a way to convince the public that wars can be won without land?

THE ONLY way Israel can beat Hizbullah is by conquering enough Lebanese territory to take Israeli territory out of missile range and holding that territory long enough to kill the Hizbullah operatives launching the attacks and destroy their arsenals. Yet today ground operations center on retaking the former security zone - a tiny foothold, control of which makes no impact on Hizbullah's continued ability to rain missiles on sovereign Israeli territory and render a quarter of the population internal refugees or relegated to hiding in bomb shelters for weeks upon weeks.

And the message is clear: Since the ground campaign has been unsuccessful in stopping the onslaught, control of territory is not a guarantee of defense and can therefore continue to be surrendered.

As for the IDF, its narrative was best enunciated by OC Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin at the cabinet meeting on Sunday. After impressing the impressionable ministers and media with data on the number of bombing sorties and the number of Hizbullah missile launchers destroyed, Yadlin presented the IDF's case for victory. He claimed that Nasrallah has gone from being perceived as the hero of the Arab world to being seen as the destroyer of Lebanon. According to Yadlin, all Hizbullah has going for it is now is Syrian and Iranian support and a whole mess of missiles.

In so arguing, Yadlin conveniently ignored the fact that pro-Hizbullah rallies are being attended by millions throughout not just the Muslim world, but in the West as well. The war in Lebanon has led senior Egyptian figures to call for the abrogation of the peace treaty with Israel; to the galvanizing of support for jihad in Iraq and, indeed, throughout the world; and to the scapegoating of Israel again by Western leftists as the aggressor in the conflict.

For their part, the leftist pontificators in the media, supported by their fellow travelers in Israeli academia, who together took control over the public debate a generation ago, are continuing their advance. These people, who forced the public to replace enquiry with intellectually fatuous slogans like "occupation" and "the Lebanon quagmire" and "peace," which all serve to block enquiry, are plowing on.

Rejecting the growing accusation that their push to force Israel to surrender South Lebanon to Hizbullah six years ago and surrender Gaza to Hamas and Fatah last summer is the reason for the current war, they claim they were right all along.

LEFTIST NEWSPAPER columnists and television and radio commentators are arguing that the cause of the current war is Israel's refusal, to date, to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, and Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem to Fatah and Hamas. In their world the fact that global jihadists are explicit about their intention to destroy "the Zionist entity," whatever its territorial boundaries may be, is studiously denied. The fact that Palestinian society is a jihadist society and that the international Left increasingly rejects Israel's very right to exist remains either irrelevant, or a matter that can be appeased away by further territorial giveaways.

Additionally, leftist opinion-makers are now arguing that the main lesson of the war is that unilateral Israeli actions are the problem. Writing in Ma'ariv last Thursday, Nadav Eyal argued that the next step will be to use the multinational force that the UN, the Olmert government and the State Department wish to deploy to Lebanon as a model that will enable future Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria (and presumably from the Golan Heights and Jerusalem). By this new logic we should continue to retreat, but next time, the French and the Turks will protect us.

Many international commentators who understand what a Hizbullah victory will mean for international security rightly argue that the international community today is repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, when it refused to contend with the growing dangers emanating from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Here in Israel, the historical period that is being recalled with increasing frequency is the winter of 1973. Then, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, as Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan sought to place all the blame for Israel's refusal to prepare for Egypt's October 6 invasion, in spite of obvious signs that it was about to take place, on the IDF, demobilized IDF reservists, led by Captain (res.) Moti Ashkenazi, launched a national protest movement. Their demand for accountability forced Meir and Dayan to resign and set the conditions for the Likud's rise to power in 1977.

THERE IS a palpable sense in Israel that we are on the edge of a revolutionary moment. Our national leadership in the government, the IDF and the media has utterly failed us.

As we stand poised on the edge of an even larger war, the main question that hangs in the balance is what lessons the Israeli people will take from the current fiasco. Will we continue to believe their fictions, or will we find a way to abandon them and move on with leaders who understand that territory is vital, that the jihad is real, that Israel has a right to defensible borders, and that Israel is not to blame for our enemies' hatred?

 

[dilloduck]

She's right, I do wonder how long we're all going to ignore what is whipping around us? (while the current US/France treaty is now tissue paper, some other version of "Peace in Our Times" is forthcoming):

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525826363&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer

It's my understanding that Israel is calling up a massive amount of firepower and manpower to move into Lebanon. Guess the Hawks got thier way. Don't expect any hollow victory claim soon.

 

[Annie]

This editorial piece connects with the above and this http://www.usmessageboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34582

Condi is sounding very UNesq. An organization that has acted again and again against democracies:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525833380&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer

Kofi Annan to Hizbullah's rescue?
ANNE BAYEFSKY, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 8, 2006

American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on the brink of handing President George W. Bush the worst diplomatic disaster of his presidency. She is poised to agree to UN resolutions that will tie the hands of both Israel and the United States in the war on terrorism and, in particular, inhibit future action on its number one state sponsor - Iran.

The catastrophe is the brainchild of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has effectively turned the United Nations into the political wing of Hizbullah. Rice and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns are working furiously to satisfy a timetable dictated by Annan, not by the interests of the United States.

How did the United Nations become the forum for producing peace between Israel and its neighbors, which have rejected the Jewish state's existence for the past six decades? In the past three weeks, a multi-headed hydra of UN actors has risen to defeat Israel on the political battlefield in an unprecedented disregard of the UN Charter's central tenet: the right of self-defense.

Existing Security Council resolutions have for years required "the Government of Lebanon to fully extend and exercise its sole and effective authority throughout the south, [and] ensure a calm environment throughout the area, including along the Blue Line, and to exert control over the use of force on its territory and from it."

A combination of Iranian aggression, Syrian support, and Lebanese impotence and malfeasance, has actively prevented the implementation of the existing resolutions.

But how did the UN respond to the aggression against the UN member state of Israel, which was launched once again from Lebanese territory and which continues to the present hour? By accusing Israel of murder, mass genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the deliberate attack of children, and racism. UN actors have even denied that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization and analogized it to anti-Nazi resistance movements. In the last three weeks, we have heard:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan:

# Israel's "excessive use of force is to be condemned;" Israel has "torn the country to shreds... Israel's disproportionate use of force and collective punishment of the Lebanese people must stop."

# Israel is "apparently" guilty of the murder of UN soldiers. The UNIFIL soldiers were killed by Israel after it responded to Hizbullah attacks on Israeli civilians. One of the soldiers had reported only days before he died that Hizbullah's nearby actions meant Israel's response "has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity." Yet without any investigation Annan immediately called it an "apparently deliberate targeting" - an accusation he has yet to retract.

# Israel has "committed grave breaches of international humanitarian law" and "has caused, and is causing, death and suffering on a wholly unacceptable scale."
​

Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown:

# Hizbullah, the Iranian-proxy currently fighting Israel, is not a terrorist organization. "It is not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism," said Malloch Brown, claiming Hizbullah is "completely separate and different from al-Qaida."
​

Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:

# "The excessive and disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defense Forces…must stop."​

Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:

# In comments Arbour directed at Israel, she said: "the bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians, is unjustifiable," suggesting that Israel was perpetrating "war crimes and crimes against humanity" for violating the "obligation to protect civilians during hostilities."​

Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict:

# In comments directed "even-handedly" to Israel and Hizbullah, Coomaraswamy "strongly condemned the repeated attacks on civilians, and especially on children, noting that callous disregard for the lives of children has permeated this conflict from its start."​

Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF:

# Veneman claimed Israel is engaged in "the continued targeting of civilians, particularly children."
​

Agha Shahi, Pakistani member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination:

# "Would Israel have resorted to the bombing of civilian infrastructure if it were fighting a non-Arab force? It was a war between different ethnic groups, the Arabs and the Jews."​

Jose Fransisco Calitzay, Guatemalan member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination:

# Commenting on events in Lebanon, Calitzay said "mass genocide was the highest level of racism that could exist, and they had to prevent that from happening in the present case."​

Mahmoud Aboul-Nasr, Egyptian member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination:

# Aboul-Nasr "objected to the designation of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. Hizbullah was not a terrorist organization; it was a resistance movement that was fighting foreign occupation, just as there had been during the Second World War."​

IN SHORT, the UN - which to this day cannot define terrorism - did not come to the aid of a UN member under fire from one of the world's leading terrorist organizations. It came to the aid of the terrorist by attempting to prevent the member state from exercising its right to hit back.

The Geneva Conventions clearly state that combatants are prohibited from using civilians as human shields, but if they do so, the presence of civilians does not render the area immune from military operations.

Israeli soldiers and civilians are paying with their lives daily as a consequence of Israel's efforts to avoid disproportionate action - a dramatic exercise of restraint taken in order to reduce Lebanese civilian casualties.

But in the face of the UN's obvious predilection to subvert Israel's well-being and American foreign policy interests, to whom has Secretary Rice turned to save the day? The United Nations!

THE RESULT has been as predictable as it has been disastrous. The UN's verbal assault on Israel is coupled with a three-pronged political agenda. The UN seeks to: (1) protect Hizbullah from further Israeli attacks, (2) produce a political win for Hizbullah by giving them the territorial prize of the Shaba Farms, and (3) increase UN presence, oversight and control of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Every element of this agenda is satisfied in the current draft UN resolution and is part of the declared intention of a second resolution to follow (some of which may end up being incorporated in the first.)

The resolution calls for a "full cessation of hostilities" and "the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations." What offensive military operations? Has Israel been engaged in a single military operation offensive and not defensive in nature?

The resolution reintroduces the notion that Israel might occupy Lebanese territory, calling for action on "areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shaba farms area." Though the resolution doesn't mention the states who are party to the dispute, leaving some possibility that the territorial dispute is between Syria and Lebanon, Syria is not mentioned.

Given that the only states named in the resolution are Israel and Lebanon, either the presence of the Shaba Farms issue means Lebanese territory is occupied by Israel (contrary to explicit UN determinations in the past) or Syria's role in arming Hizbullah is now being rewarded by the UN.

The draft resolution on the current crisis says the Security Council "expresses its intention…to authorize in a further resolution under Chapter VII of the Charter the deployment of a UN mandated international force to…contribute to the implementation of a permanent cease-fire and a long-term solution."

It calls for renewed involvement of UNIFIL, the UN troops that stood and watched Hizbullah rearm and plan its deadly assault on a UN member state for the last six years.

Such an international force is to be authorized under the first-ever Chapter VII resolution - a legally binding resolution that can be implemented through sanctions or the use of force - in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In other words, Secretary Rice has approved of a UN-authorized and monitored force that has its sights set on Israel too, coupled with a claim that Israel is currently engaged in "offensive" operations.

THE VERY UN that accuses Israel of murder and heinous violations of international law is now to be charged with judging compliance with a legally binding instrument purporting to define the terms and conditions of Israel's self-defense. The original idea of a Chapter VII force to disarm Hizbullah was coupled with a serious NATO presence. The current draft is the worst of both worlds - a much-watered down force with considerable UN-control coupled with a Chapter VII mandate that could easily be turned on the UN's perpetual whipping boy - Israel.

In addition, the draft resolution:

# fails to call in its operative section for the immediate release of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers,

# introduces the notion that settling the issue of all Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel - regardless of their crimes - will be the quid pro quo for the Israelis' release,

# speaks of financial and humanitarian assistance only to the Lebanese people while ignoring restitution or aid for the one million Israelis in bomb shelters over the last three weeks and the 300,000 displaced

# lends credibility to another manufactured grievance, the return by Israel of "remaining maps of land mines in Lebanon" - though Israel has already returned maps of old mines years ago, and no mention is made of Hizbullah providing the UN with maps of its newly-laid land mines,

# enhances Kofi Annan's authority to judge Israel by extending an open-ended invitation to inform the Security Council continually about any action he believes "might adversely affect the search for a long-term solution"

# fails to mention "Hizbullah" or terrorism even once, let alone stating that Hizbullah is directly responsible for the Lebanese civilian casualties it cynically promotes.

# omits entirely any reference to Iran or Syria, as if the address of the arms suppliers and bosses of their Hizbullah proxies are too sensitive to include.
​

THERE WILL be only one sure result of this move - the empowerment of terrorists whose ultimate target is the United States, Israel and all democratic values. Secretary Rice's belief that there is a serious convergence between the United Nations agenda and American foreign policy needs in the age of terrorism is a profound error in judgment for which democratic societies everywhere will be forced to pay a heavy price.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, professor at Touro Law Center and editor of www.EYEontheUN.org.