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IMO even the Lebanese army soldiers who want to make this work simply cannot do much anyway- Hizbollah will put the squeeze or the knife to their families.
milnewstbay said:Hizbullah will not hand over its weapons to the Lebanese government but rather refrain from exhibiting them publicly, according to a new compromise that is reportedly brewing between Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Seniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
zipperhead_cop said:Anybody that thought Hezbollah (Hizbullah? Dammit, how is it supposed to be spelled??!?!?) would disarm is smoking rope. I agree, the cease fire is just an opportunity for them to reorg and resupp.
Nations refuse to disarm Hezbollah
U.S., France, UN and Lebanon put deal in jeopardy
Allan Woods
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
WASHINGTON - The countries tasked with upholding the shaky truce in Lebanon appeared unwilling to force the disarmament of Hezbollah yesterday, a development that threatens to delay the creation of a massive United Nations peacekeeping force and could ultimately set off fresh conflict in the region.
France, the United States, the United Nations and Lebanon itself have all refused to accept responsibility for stripping the Lebanese Shiite militia of their weapons, despite a key element of the UN resolution that calls for the group to give up its firepower and vacate the southern part of the country.
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said on Monday that his force will not be pressured into disarming, and he gained key support yesterday from Lebanon's Defence Minister, Elian Murr, who has refused to take up the task of disarmament.
The Lebanese Cabinet agreed to the UN resolution on Saturday, but Mr. Murr explained that his job is not disarmament, but rather to "ensure the security of the [Islamic] Resistance and citizens, to protect the victory of the Resistance."
The Islamic Resistance is the armed wing of Hezbollah. London's al-Hayat newspaper reported yesterday that the Lebanese government is considering allowing fighters to keep their weapons in the southern border zone in violation of the UN resolution.
The about-face is giving the rest of the world second thoughts as well, particularly France, which lost 58 French soldiers to a Hezbollah suicide attack that also killed 231 U.S. Marines the last time it was deployed in Beirut, in 1983.
Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French Foreign Minister, warned yesterday that France, which is expected to contribute 4,000 troops and lead the UN mission, will stay out of Lebanon until it receives guarantees Hezbollah has disarmed. He is expected to discuss the issue at meetings with the Lebanese government in Beirut today. Similarly, both the United States, which does not plan to send troops to Lebanon, and Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the French commander of UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force currently on the ground, said it is up to the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its weapons.
"It is Lebanon that is responsible for determining its own future in this regard," David Welch, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told reporters in Washington yesterday. "By passing this resolution 15-0, unanimously in the Security Council, the world's voice has been made crystal clear."
A spokesman for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in New York that it is up to Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah, but that the UN would offer help to enforce the process. The crisis in the Israel-Lebanon conflict comes as the international community scrambles to determine which countries will contribute to the promised 15,000-troop UN peacekeeping force, and how soon they can get there.
A senior UN official told the BBC the world body is aiming to get an advance force of up to 3,500 troops into Lebanon within two weeks. Lebanon plans to start moving 15,000 of its own soldiers into the southern part of the country this week, and Israel said it could pull out of Lebanon within 10 days. But Maj.-Gen. Pellegrini told France's Le Monde newspaper yesterday that it could take up to one year to get the full force in place in southern Lebanon. Sean McCormack, a U.S. State Department spokesman, said the force needs to be deployed "on a much more urgent basis than that."
"Nobody believes that deploying the force in months is acceptable," he said yesterday.
The question of how quickly the UN force can be in place is vital because last Friday's resolution calls for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces in southern Lebanon at the same time as the international force takes up its positions.
Should the UN force fail to materialize, Israel faces a choice of remaining in southern Lebanon, where skirmishes with Hezbollah fighters continued yesterday, or accepting the presence of a weak Lebanese army as a buffer between it and Hezbollah.
Formal offers of troop contributions are expected to start coming in tomorrow. The bulk of the force is expected to be made of French and Italian troops. Turkey, Indonesia, Spain and Morocco have also been mentioned as potential contributors. Yet as much of the world watches the slow diplomatic process of cleaning up after a war, Israel has already set its sights on what it considers the larger threat to Middle East peace -- Iran.
Shimon Peres, Israel's deputy prime minister, was meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss the situation in the Middle East ahead of a North American tour to raise what is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstructions efforts in northern Israel, which was hit hard in the fighting.
U.S. President George W. Bush has been equally vocal about what he calls the destabilizing role that Iran plays in the Middle East, particularly since the Israel-Lebanon conflict began last month. Earlier this week, he warned that it would have been worse had Iran possessed "the nuclear weapon it seeks."
© National Post 2006
called it. Not so much a prediction, mind you, as simply re-iterating what has gone on before. Often, since the Palestinian invasion, followed by the Israeli one. And, it's gonna happen again, with even more disastrous results for Israel in the Int'l media, and worse, for the Lebanese people on the ground. Except this time, it will also have a larger impact on third-party soldiers.big bad john said:But one day after a cease-fire, and just hours after Nasrallah promised that "the brothers, who are your brothers" would take on the reconstruction, Hizbullah's extensive social services system shifted from a war footing to sizing up the huge rebuild task...But Hizbullah's immediate promise to rebuild - along with widespread confidence here that the resistance won a victory over Israel - is tapping into fresh anger over the destruction, and winning more support for the "Party of God."...That work, financed by rich Lebanese Shiites at home and abroad, through local donations, and with significant funds from outside, especially Iran, has done as much as Hizbullah's battles against Israel to win popular support among the Shiites...
CanadaPhil said:So it looks like the question of the day is WHO WON??
Originally posted by Infanteer:
Anyways, IMHO, tactical stalemate = strategic loss for Israel.
The material losses for Hezbollah will probably be inconsequential. They'll have plenty of recruits, money and weapons to replace their losses.
What they gained is legitimacy where they want it. They stood and fought the IDF, making other Arab nations (including our allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) look inconsequential. I think they also made the Lebanese government and military look ineffective - if it didn't before, Hezbollah seems to rival the Lebanese state. They scored a ratings coup by, to many people, sending the IDF back to Israel for the second time. In the Arabic (and Islamic?) world at large, they seem to be riding a Public Relations wave, as Abu Buckwheat's observations attest to.
As well, the IDF offensive with tacit US support will probably be a propaganda coup for the AQ machine. No matter how controlled you are, a Western war machine is quite devastating to the local environs and our enemies will play that for all its worth in the "Zionist/Crusader Offensive" catagory", costing us political currency in the hearts and minds catagory.
The solution isn't much either - a UN/Lebanese force. The Hizbollah probably will have the local guys by the balls with a knife and unless you get a real good UN force (the Kiwi's come to mind) you are probably going to have an ineffective military force (anyone with experience with the Eurorentals in ISAF will know what I mean).
I give the real victory to those who's strategic goals are a further escalation between Islamist and Western interests at the expense of our influence in the region. :sigh:
For what it's worth - Cheers,
Infanteer