Lebanon is a lost opportunity to win hearts and minds in the middle east. It may have been this administration's last.
We [I use the pronoun only as a short-hand for US policymakers] could have made a small step to restoring our credibility and making ourselves politically and philosophically relevant in the region. This "crisis" really would have been an opportunity...had Israel responded with restraint or the US been willing to at least publicly try and talk Israel down from a full scale invasion.
Arab people are rightfully suspicious of any American involvement in the affairs of the middle east, more so after the invasion of Iraq, so unnecessary, so dishonest, so ideological and so very botched. I have no statistics on this, but I feel comfortable in supposing that any semi-conscious Arab person living in the middle east would at best be cynical of America. At very worst, driven to suicidal hatred of us.
Lebanon, though, offered an opening to show that the US can act with disinterest and demonstrate a genuine commitment to peace and stability; instead, by using Israel as a violent proxy, by failing to call for an end to or mitigation of hostility, by condoning, even encouraging the severity of the Israeli response, the Bush administration continues to shoot itself in the booted foot of "democracy and freedom" with which it's trampling the region.
Resolving the situation has nothing to do, initially, with who shot first. Which of the combatants holds the moral high ground is practically irrelevant. Such debates only affirm intransigence. The only issue here is not letting Something Potentially Dangerous to the region turn into Something VERY Dangerous to the world. The first step in any reasonable solution ought to be ending the violence from both sides quickly, limiting the chance of a broader conflict. But now, much of the Arab world is uniting behind Hezbollah, an organization which clearly will mislead it to unending violence. The conflict will drag on until something happens to end it. And unless dominant attitudes change, what happens is unlikely to be peaceful.
The Bush administration doesn't want to quench the fire; they want to stoke it. Josh Marhshall now quotes an article from the Jerusalem post (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/...) alleging that the US has encouraged Israel to draw Syria into the conflict, though Israel clearly does not wish to do so and has assured Syria that it wouldn't. The US, at the start of the invasion two weeks ago, rushed shipments of missiles to Israel, funding and arming its invasion.
The latest Israeli strike on civilians (and ambulances), while possibly (even probably) errors, might have forced an end to the conflict; if nothing else, it forced very brief reprieve. If there's any competence at the State Department (well...one can dream), things ought to have gone from here to a ceasefire to negotiations. Even then, it would have been too late for the US to act as an honest broker: such a peace would not have been achieved not through capable statesmanship, but only because Israel had been shamed by a war crime into laying down its weapons. That's no foundation upon which to build a lasting peace. All fine, since there's no clear intention to create a lasting peace.
This conflict, when it ends, will leave many in the Arab world angry; given precedent, they are likely to seek, vengeance and Israel likely to respond with incommensurate force. Thus, the conflict will never end. Hezbollah has been surprisingly well armed, and yes, they might only able now to sling stones at a giant. They'll lose, probably, and they'll be temporarily disabled. But this hydra will rear another head in Lebanon or elsewhere. It may, like bin Laden, get proactive. I can already foretaste the dystopian nightmare life here at home could become if another major terrorist attack occurs before the next presidential election, or even before this November. It's hard not to follow the logic to extreme conclusions.
This road is a dead end, not only for security in the middle east, but within the US. It points to no stable future. And the Bush administration has squandered a legitimate chance to play peacemaker in the same region where it has so far created violence and chaos. A legitimate chance to demonstrate a tiny measure of political or economic disinterest in the hope of bringing some stability, some greater good to the global community.
But hey, a leopard can't change his spots, they say. It's clear that there never was an intention to win hearts and minds. The agenda is war, the US wants it, and they're letting Israel provoke it.
This is foolhardy, a reasonable person might conclude, especially upon considering America's stretched resources and deteriorating domestic conditions. Why are they agitating for a war? Perhaps they want a pretext for attacking other regions of the middle east before a more organized and better armed radical anti-American Islamic movement coalesces. Perhaps it really is all about the oil. Perhaps it's apocalyptic Christian thinking. Perhaps it's a red herring to distract the public from Iraq or the failing Global War on Terror before the mid-term elections. Perhaps they really do believe in the inherent rightness of their policy and think that they can end terrorism once and for all at the point of a missile (and if you make a few bucks along the way, well, what's the harm?). I can only speculate, but every guess leads me to reconsidering the myopia and bankruptcy of our leadership in following out the untenable logic of aggression.
Does anyone else feel like good Starbuck of the Pequod, stuck aboard a doomed ship in the service of a single-minded madman who destroys himself in chasing a monster?
