After the Lebanon Ceasefire
Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He is a the author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003). This is an updated version of an article first published by FPIF on 8/22/06.
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The UN Security Council resolution passed on August 11 which belatedly imposed a ceasefire to end the fighting in Lebanon was certainly good news in terms of ending the carnage. Resolution 1701 was also a marked improvement over the original US draft and contains some positive language. Both sides, for instance, are called upon to honor “a full cessation of hostilities.” And Israel must provide the UN with maps of landmines planted in southern Lebanon during Israel’s 22-year occupation that ended in 2000.
But the ceasefire resolution took much longer than necessary to achieve. The fighting could have ended weeks earlier, but the United States threatened to veto earlier draft resolutions. Instead, the Bush administration insisted on a version that would have allowed Israel to remain in Lebanon and continue at least some military operations, provisions rejected by other Security Council members. These delays cost the lives of hundreds of civilians and billions of dollars worth of damage to Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, however, was clearly unperturbed by the additional weeks of killings. “This has been time that’s been well spent over the last couple of weeks,” she said at an August 7 press conference with President Bush.
Perhaps more troubling for the future, Resolution 1701 contains some disturbing ambiguities that may make a permanent peace between Lebanon and Israel elusive.
Close Reading of the Text
The new resolution has some troubling ambiguities. It calls on Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon “in parallel” with Lebanese army forces as they move into positions throughout that part of the country. The lack of a timetable, however, has raised concerns that a full Israeli withdrawal might take many months.
While Israel was responsible for far more death and destruction than Hezbollah, the resolution refers to the suffering of “both sides,” implying symmetry in the two countries’ experiences.
And though Israel — both in the recent round of fighting and historically — has launched more attacks against Lebanon than any Lebanese party has against Israel, the United States successfully demanded that the peacekeeping force only be deployed on the Lebanese side of the border. Similarly, and also at the insistence of the United States, the resolution calls for the “unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers” seized by Hezbollah commandoes inside Israel, but only for “encouraging” efforts to settle “the issue of Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel” who were abducted by Israeli commandos inside Lebanon.
US Role in Starting the War
The resolution speaks of “the need to address urgently the causes that have given rise to the current crisis, including… the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers.” The original US draft referred to the seizure of the Israeli soldiers as the single “root cause” of the crisis. The compromise language of the resolution, while more ambiguous about the conflict’s origins, makes no reference to the widespread evidence that Israel — with strong encouragement from the Bush administration — had actually been planning this assault on Lebanon for many months or to the fact that Israel had repeatedly violated Lebanese air space and engaged in other border violations in the months and years leading up to the July 12 attack by Hezbollah on the Israeli border post.
Indeed, there is increasing evidence that Israel instigated a disastrous war on Lebanon largely at the behest of the United States.
In his May 23 summit with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President George W. Bush offered full US support for Israel to attack Lebanon as soon as possible. Seymour Hersh, in the August 21 New Yorker, quotes a Pentagon consultant on the Bush administration’s longstanding desire to strike “a preemptive blow against Hezbollah.” The consultant added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” Hersh also quotes a former senior intelligence official as saying that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
On July 30, the Jerusalem Post reported that President Bush pushed Israel to expand the war beyond Lebanon and attack Syria. Israeli officials apparently found the idea “nuts.”
This idea was not exactly secret. In support of the Israeli offensive, the office of the White House Press Secretary released a list of talking points that included reference to a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Max Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who is close to the Bush administration. The article, “It’s Time to Let the Israelis Take Off the Gloves,” urges an Israeli attack against Syria. “Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard,” argues Boot. “If it does, it will be doing Washington’s dirty work.”
Iran, too, was in the administration’s sights. The Israeli attack on Lebanon, according to Seymour Hersh, was to “serve as a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.” But first, the Bush administration needed to get rid of Hezbollah’s capacity to retaliate against Israel in the event of a US strike on Iran.
Not only have a growing number of Israelis acknowledged that the war has been a disaster for Israel, there is growing recognition of US responsibility for getting them into that mess. A July 23 article in the leading Israeli daily Haaretz about an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv noted that “this was a distinctly anti-American protest” that included “chants of ‘We will not die and kill in the service of the United States,’ and slogans condemning President George W. Bush.”
A majority of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress went on record unconditionally backing Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, supporting House resolution 921 which denied Israeli war crimes and other violations of international law and grossly exaggerated the role of Syria and Iran in support for Hezbollah in language that could pave the way for at US attack against those countries. In response to the outrage of peace and human rights activists, these Congressional hawks have claimed they were simply trying to show solidarity with the Jewish state. In supporting the Bush administration, however, they were actually defending policies that cynically use Israel to advance the US administration’s militarist agenda.
Other Resolutions, Other Violations
The United States has placed great emphasis on the implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which calls for the respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and unity of Lebanon “under the sole and exclusive authority of the Government of Lebanon throughout Lebanon,” the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon, the extension of Lebanese government control over all Lebanese territory, and the disbanding and disarmament of all militias.
However, statements from the Bush administration and a series of congressional resolutions have only mentioned the disbanding and disarmament of Hezbollah’s militia, even though Israel’s reoccupation of parts of southern Lebanon was also in violation of 1559. Typical was President Bush’s August 7 statement to the press: “Had the parties involved fully implemented 1559, which called for the disarmament of Hezbollah, we would not be in the situation we’re in today.”
It is striking how much the administration and a bipartisan majority in Congress have pressed Hezbollah — over which the United States has little leverage — to abide by UN Security Council resolution 1559 while not calling on the implementation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions currently being violated by Israel, over which the United States has enormous leverage. These include UN Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465, and 471, which call on Israel to withdraw from its settlements in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem; UN Security Council resolution 497, which calls on Israel to rescind its annexation of the Golan Heights; UN Security Council resolutions 252, 267, 298, 476, and 478, which call on Israel to rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem; and UN Security Council resolution 487, which calls on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States either voted in favor of or abstained on every one of these resolutions. Not included in this list are the 42 Security Council resolutions on Israeli violations of international legal norms that were vetoed by the United States and therefore do not have the force of law.
The US government clearly believes that enforcement of UN resolutions depends not on any objective legal standard but on the relations that a given government or party has with the US.
Ceasefire Implications
Israel has been sufficiently bloodied by its ill-fated ground assault against entrenched Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon that it will not likely try again, even if pressed by Washington. The presence of the Lebanese army and international forces in the south can also serve as a deterrent to future Israeli aggression. Further commando raids as well as future air strikes and other forms of collective punishment against the Lebanese people are still quite possible, however, thanks to the successful effort by the Bush administration, with bipartisan support from Capitol Hill, to block the UN from sanctioning or even censuring Israeli war crimes.
Given the political advantages gained by Hezbollah from the recent conflict, the extremist group may seek to provoke another one. The resolution does not explicitly call for the total disarmament of Hezbollah’s militia nor does it give the multinational force the authority to force such a move. However, it does clearly bar Hezbollah forces from operating south of the Litani River, which would keep the militia at least twenty miles from the Israeli border. It also refers to a previous Security Council resolution (UNSC 1559) and a treaty signed by various Lebanese parties (the Taif Accords) which call for all such militias within Lebanon to disarm and disband. The resolution also bans the “sales or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by the government,” presumably as a means of stopping Iran from providing additional missiles to Hezbollah. It is unclear whether the Lebanese government, even backed by a multinational force, will be able to enforce these edicts.
The inability of the UN to stop the fighting earlier and the weakness of the resulting compromise demonstrate that the power of the United States in the Security Council severely restricts the UN from fulfilling its principal mandate to prevent aggression by one state against another. If a UN member state can launch a full-scale attack on the civilian infrastructure of a neighboring member state following a minor border incident, this constitutes a serious breakdown in the international legal order. As with the US invasion of Iraq, the US-Israeli war on Lebanon has shown that the United States and its allies can get away with breaking the most fundamental international laws that have provided at least some semblance of global order since World War II.
And if the United States — the most dominant military and economic power in the world — believes that it and its allies do not have to play by the rules, why should Hezbollah or anyone else?
