How will the current Lebanon conflict end?
Israel is day by day losing its moral ground. Attacks on clearly marked ambulances, the use of cluster ammunition and phosphorous bombs are now toping the obviously unproportional use of force applied since the first days of this war on Lebanon.
The mainstream media folks are in history altering propaganda mode, so here is my take for you to discuss of what has led to this and what, I think, the current endgame may be.
This war, planed for a long time, did not start in a vacuum and it did not start with the two Israeli soldiers taken POW by Hezbollah.
After 22 years of bloody occupation, Israel forces left Lebanon unilaterally in 2000. The UN security council certified that Israel thereby had fullfilled resolution 425, i.e. leaving all of Lebanon. But the Lebanese government claims that the Shebaa farms, part of the Syrian Golan heights and occupied by Israel since 1973, are part of its country and demands them to be returned. Israel also for years has imprisoned several Lebanese it fetched during the occupation.
Since it withdrawed, Israel has made daily illegal "reconnaissances" flights within Lebanese air space. It did attack Lebanese fisherman. There were several skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces in the Shebaa farm area, especially after a 15 year old shepard was shot on Lebanese ground.
There were also several unsuccessful and successful targeted killings of Palestinian and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon this year. In June the Lebanese government busted a terror ring, alleged to have done these assessinations and connected to Mossad, an Israeli secret service.
Whoever claims that Hezbollah started the current event, ignores this decade old history of violent tit for tat.
Unlike Israel claims, the prisoner taking of the IDF soldiers by Hezbollah's military wing may have happened on Lebanese ground. At least five of the Israeli eight soldiers who died that day definitely were killed within Lebanon. Hezbollah demands all Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails to be released in an exchange for the POWs.
Israel now, for the first time and wrongly, declared the Lebanese government to be responsible for a Hezbollah act. In haste, it ordered the Israeli Defense Forces to implement the long prepared plans for an all out air war on Lebanon. After the first air attacks, Hesbollah started to launch katjushas and bigger unguided rockets on Israel military installations and population centers.
Yesterday Rice presented the Israeli ceasefire conditions to the Lebanese Premier. This was an ultimatum to fulfill all of Israel's demands before the bombing stops, not a negotiation offer. After she left Beirut, the bombings, which had been halted for a few hours, started to anew.
Israel demands that Hezbollah shall be disarmed in accordance with UN resolution 1559 by either the Lebanese government or an international force. (Israel, with dozens of unfulfilled UN resolutions against it, demanding such, is a serious joke by itself.) No Lebanese government can do so and survive and no international force will be willing (although some German politicians here are getting cocky) to disarm Hezbollah. Any "neutral" force would also have to shoot down Israeli planes violating Lebanese air space. Otherwise it would be rightly seen as an Israeli pawn. Any volunteers out there to fight down the IAF?
Hezbollah has agreed to lay down its arms, if the Shebaa farms are returned to Lebanon and it has promised to free the Israeli soldiers, if Israel returns all Lebanese prisoners.
That is the "durable solution" Rice is demanding in Israel's name.
Israel is running out of time. The propaganda wall of a "moral" war of "poor little Israel" is crumbling with each report on the ongoing atrocites. The IAF is also running out of targets to bomb, while Hezbollah has enough rockets left to keep a third of Israel's population in bunkers for at least another month. It even could escalate by firing its longest range weapons into Tel Aviv.
The Israeli demand can not be fullfilled by any Lebanese government. No international force will pop up to do the dirty work. The Israeli negotiation position is quite bad now. Either they escalate the conflict by attacking Syria under some fable excuse, or they need to negotiate seriously and they will have to accept Lebanese conditions too.
As Zvi Bar'el writes in Haaretz, The road to peace runs through Shaba Farms. He is right, but here it is getting tricky because Syria comes into the game.
The UN security council regards the Shebaa Farms as Syrian territory, because all available historic maps showed it to be Syrian proper. Syrian has, through its Foreign minister, orally declared that the Shebaa farms are Lebanese territory. Also the people of the farms claim to be Lebanese and payed taxes to the Lebanense state. The UN demands a written declaration from Syria. But de jure, Syria does not even accept Lebanon to be a seperate state, but regards it as a historic pre-colonial part of a greater Syria.
To solve this mess Syria has to be part of the solution. The Syrian president Assad of course knows this and he will come up with his own demands. These will definitly include the return of the Golan heights to Syria after which he may give the Shebaa farms back to Lebanon.
But the Golan heights are an important water resource and Israel definitly does not want to give them back to anybody.
So all this points well to a stalemate. Israel may try to catch and to occupy again some very bloody few miles of Lebanese ground, but it can not bomb Beirut forever. After the bombing stops, Hezbollah will replenish its arsenals and will continue to drop a few katjushas here and there, but it will stop firing them at major population center. They have been through an occupation before and did win and they think they will win again.
Without any ceasefire and peace deal in sight, the conflict will settle down in a few days and then keep simmering for some more years until another Israeli and/or another US administration will find some brain and try to implement a real solution.
The Lebanese have lost a lot of people and a lot of money. They will recover.
But the US' and Israeli government have lost a whole lot political standing in front of their populations, the middle east and the whole world. It will take many years for them to recover any of that now lost moral ground.
Meanwhile Palestinians in the Gaza strip and the West Bank get hit really hard and nobody is looking their way.
(Also at Moon of Alabama)