West divided over Israel-Lebanon crisis and More

As the Israeli air campaign against Lebanon entered its eighth day on Thursday, the US and the EU continued to grapple for an adequate response with increased concern about civilian suffering in the region.

On Wednesday, Israeli air strikes killed more than 50 people across Lebanon. Israeli military officials also said they had bombed a bunker sheltering Hizbollah leaders, though Hizbollah said none of its members were killed in the operation.

On Thursday, Israel urged Lebanese residents in the country's south to evacuate before more strikes. Also on Thursday, Israeli forces battled Hizbollah forces on the Lebanese side of the border, suffering an unknown number of casualties, news agencies reported. Israeli forces crossed in an attempt to push back Hizbollah, which has been firing rockets into northern Israel. Hizbollah fired more than 100 rockets into northern Israel on Wednesday alone, hitting Haifa and Nazareth and killing two Israeli-Arab boys, news agencies reported.

The fighting between Israel and Lebanon erupted nine days ago after a Hizbollah raid in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two others abducted. After the clash Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that the battle had only just begun.

In an interview with Paris-based France Inter radio on Thursday, Lebanon’s President Emile Lahoud demanded an immediate ceasefire and called Israel’s offensive a “massacre.”

In a further development, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said Israeli and Hizbollah leaders could face war crimes charges if it is proven that they have deliberately targeted civilians.

A Wednesday editorial on the online version of The Economist expressed concern that Israel, if it failed to achieve its aim in the current air campaign, might once again have to “commit serious numbers of ground forces [and] risks getting bogged down in southern Lebanon.”

Has Israel “fallen for a Hizbollah trap?” the editorial asks. Unclear about Hizbollah’s exact intentions in the present conflict, the editorial speculates that Hizbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers to provoke a forceful Israeli response to “drag Israel into a war on two fronts, perhaps with the backing of Syria and Iran [which would both] benefit from chaos and instability in the region.” This line of thinking has also been seen in the Israeli media, with some speculating that the Hizbollah border raid was also meant to steal the limelight from Hamas' recent success in attacking an Israeli outpost near the Gaza Strip.

A divided EU
According to the Associated Press, EU member states fear that continued Israeli bombardment would strengthen the hand of Islamists and terrorist groups using the imagery of civilian casualties in Lebanon as a propaganda tool.

In the meantime, the EU has called Israel’s action a “disproportionate” use of force and has demanded an immediate ceasefire. EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana repeated this call during a visit to Israel on Wednesday.

French President Jacques Chirac urged both Hizbollah and Israel to stop the hostilities. France, which currently holds the presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and has historic ties with Lebanon, has issued a proposal for a binding UNSC resolution to bring the fighting to a halt.

Equally worried about further escalation of the conflict is Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who indirectly criticized Israel’s action by lamenting “the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.” On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin held out the possibility of contributing Russian troops if the UNSC was to establish a security force in southern Lebanon.

The British newspaper The Guardian heavily criticized the weak and divided EU position in a Tuesday editorial: “Europe’s position […] matters because it aspires to play a role on the world stage, because the Middle East is its own backyard and because the area’s quarrels can explode on our streets and trains.”

“European citizens, want to know that the EU is not just watching helplessly and letting the US dictate vital decisions as fateful, bloody and epoch-making events unfold,” the editorial continued.

Both Europe and the US have so far failed to agree on a decisive policy to bring the fighting to a halt.

The question of a UN defense force
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Tuesday called for the deployment of a multinational force to Lebanon - an idea that the US and Israel have so far opposed.

US skepticism is grounded in the fact that the 2000-strong UN peacekeeping force that is already stationed in southern Lebanon has failed to prevent the positioning of thousands of rockets by Hizbollah militants. Similarly, UNSC Resolution 1559, which calls for the complete disarming of Hizbollah, has failed to achieve its objective.

Moreover, the US, which has consistently affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against Hizbollah attacks, wants to give Israel more time to expel Hizbollah from the region. “A cease-fire [a prerequisite for the deployment of UN forces] that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Former intelligence analyst with the US State Department and Defense Department Anthony Cordesman explained during an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the effective deployment of a UN peacekeeping force would require the active support of the Lebanese government and military, as well as the cooperation of the Shi'ite population in southern Lebanon.

Similarly pessimistic about the rapid deployment of a UN force in Lebanon is former German oreign minister and Middle East expert Joschka Fischer, who told the German newspaper Die Zeit that “another Blue Helmet mandate will make little sense. Only a robust mandate could perhaps achieve something positive.” Fischer stressed the importance of Washington's role in solving the conflict. He called the failure of the “Middle East Quartet” (US, EU, UN and Russia) to effectively address the conflict “a tragedy.”

Meanwhile, Italy has backed the British proposal for a UN peacekeeping force, but some have questioned its motivation. In a commentary published in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Stefano Folli speculated that newly elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has domestic political objectives in mind. By supporting a UN intervention, Prodi seeks to win over the mainly anti-Israel radical left within his ruling coalition, Folli opined. “These groups see the United Nations as retribution meted out to Israel, which is paradoxical indeed, because intervention by the Blue Helmets was something else in Blair’s scheme of things: an international shouldering of responsibility for disarming the Hizbollah.”

By catering to his far-left allies, Folli speculates, Prodi seeks to gain the left’s support for a funding renewal for Italy's military mission in Afghanistan, which the radical left has so far opposed. The Italian parliament will vote on the funding request on 25 July. “Israel would be the great collective excuse for fostering a compromise on the left over the mission in Kabul. A strange, but not surprising arabesque,” the editorial concluded.

Lamenting US weakness
William Kristol, writing in the neo-conservative US magazine Weekly Standard, does not see the crisis in Lebanon as a local war requiring a local solution. Rather, he depicts the conflict as part of a global struggle between Islam and “liberal democratic civilization.”

“What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West.”

Kristol called upon the US government to focus less on Hamas and Hizbollah and more “on their paymasters and real commanders - Syria and Iran." The United States needs to forcefully reassert its power in the region and “pursue […] regime change in Syria and Iran,” even considering “a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”

The US has stood aside for too long, making itself appear weak in the eyes of its Islamist enemies, Kristol said.

On the liberal spectrum of the US foreign policy debate, weakness is lamented in diplomatic rather than military terms. John Judis noted in the New Republic Online that Arab-Israeli crises always tended to inflame when “the United States has been either unable or unwilling to play an aggressive role as a mediator,” and added that “most [conflicts] have only abated after the United States has finally thrown itself into the middle of them.” Before the Six Day War, for example, the US was too bogged down in Vietnam to help prevent Egypt’s provocation from escalating.

At the same time, Judis noted, “the greatest progress in Arab-Israeli relations occurred during the Carter and Clinton administrations when American policymakers were most clearly concentrating on the conflict.”

Judis blamed the current Bush administration for its hands-off approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. “[Bush’s] principal means of seeking peace in the region were based on a neoconservative fantasy about the road to Jerusalem passing through Baghdad […] and on the assumption that Palestinian elections would result in a moderate alternative to the late Yasir Arafat," Judis argued. When these strategies proved to be unsuccessful and Hamas won the Palestinian elections, the US stood by helplessly, which, according to Judis, precipitated the current crisis.

But some disagree as to how much leverage the US has over the conflict.

Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash does not believe Washington could effect much change. “Welcome to the world’s new multipolar disorder,” he wrote in the commentary pages of The Guardian. “The unipolar moment of apparently unchallengeable American supremacy” is over Ash predicted, noting that the emerging new multipolarity is defined by the rise of other states - such as China, India and Russia - and the growing power of non-state actors, including terrorist groups. These groups are aided by technological developments that allow them to inflict considerable harm to powerful states despite their being a small and weak minority.

“The net effect of these very disparate trends is to reduce the relative power of established western states, above all of the US," Ash wrote, noting that changes in the geopolitical power structure have historically brought about new waves of violence. “Be careful what you wish for,” Ash warned. “You might even find yourself nostalgic for the bad old days of American supremacy.”