Middle East Muddle

Breaking: Multiple sources are saying that the Israeli air force has struck at a Beirut building suspected to be housing a high-ranking member of the Hizbullah terrorist organization.

Israel seems to be isolating Beirut, blockading the city, shutting down the airports, and taking out bridges on the highway to Syria, according to AP. What this seems to indicate to me is a serious willingness to take care of the Hizbullah leadership, finishing what should have been done long ago. Israel, meantime, claims its goal is a more difficult disarmament; considering that on a per capita basis your average unstable Middle Eastern nation has more guns than an Idaho militia, I think a more focused goal might be desirable.

If indeed Syria and/or Iran are behind the kidnappings and the escalation, then it appears they've miscalculated - and they've blinked. JPost reports that both Syria and Saudi Arabia criticized Hizbullah's attacks, Syria calling for them to stop their missile attacks in northern Israel. Syria's reaction, I think, is informed by a fear of Israel turning its focus to Damascus. However, I don't think Syria's attempts to separate themselves from Hizbullah's attacks will work if Israel feels that sufficient pressure on Damascus might resolve the crisis to their liking.

One telling report from JPost serves to strengthen the case for implicating Iran in all of this: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to repair the damages to Lebanese infrastructure caused by Israeli airstrikes. The man clearly doesn't want to directly involve his own forces (though Iran has apparently used Revolutionary Guards units in Lebanon before), but sees his Hizbullah proxies seriously shaken by the Israeli counteroffensive. Thus an obvious solution is to indirectly support them through infrastructure repair, allowing Iran to continue to arm the terrorist group.

Another clue to Israel's role will come next week in the wake of the G8 conference. Concerns about Israeli reactions to terrorist aggression have supplanted any substantive discussion of Iran's attempts to secure nuclear weapons. If this was, as I suspect, one of Tehran's goals in unleashing Hizbullah and Hamas, we should see a significant reduction in missile attacks and overall aggression, perhaps even the surrender of the captured soldiers, next week.

Apparently conservative fears about Syria and Iran being the puppeteers in this fracas are catching on as Chirac said essentially the same thing yesterday. Chirac also joined the growing chorus of world opinion that called Israel's reactions to the kidnappings disproportionate, a typical response to most Israeli actions. Of course in typical European hypocrisy, UN humanitarian official Jan Egeland said "You are supposed to do something to the armed group. You are not supposed to hurt the children of people who have nothing to do with this." While Egeland was talking about Israeli targeted airstrikes with civilian collateral damage, the sentiment is far more apropos to the missile barrages launched by Hizbullah without pretense of a military target.

It's becoming clear that, despite Lebanese pleas and public pressure, President Bush will make no effort to force a cease-fire upon Israel. Although there are justifiable concerns about Lebanon's fledgling democracy being weakened by the continued conflict, I certainly think this is a classic example of "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Even the democratic, nominally pro-Western Lebanese government of the present post-Syria era has resisted disarming Hizbullah as such an action could potentially reignited civil war such as the one that tore the country apart in the 1980s. If the government will not undertake to disarm the terrorists, then perhaps the Israelis can do it for them. There are of course weaknesses in this plan, such as turning more Lebanese against the Israelis, but in the long run an essential ingredient for Middle Eastern peace is a stable Lebanon free of terrorist parasites like Hizbullah.

Also from JPost: Mahmoud Abbas has apparently threatened to resign, dismantle the Palestinian Authority, and withdraw from the Palestinian Territories during a call with Condoleeza Rice, claiming he no longer has any authority and that Israel is destroying his infrastructure. There is a sort of historical precedent for such actions, as the PLO under Arafat spent several years in exile in Tunis during the early to mid 1980s, having fled an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and displacing them from their old haunts in Beirut.

An interesting op-ed by the editor of the Lebanese Daily Star. Although I don't agree with all of his points, it's worth reading; I'll try and deconstruct it fully later.

In examining the roots of this contest, Charles Kruathamer cuts to the heart of the matter and places the blame where it belongs: with terrorist organizations seeking an end to what they see as an illegal, racist, Zionist state. Two quotes will suffice; I'd suggest reading the whole thing:

The fighting is about "the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967."

In 1967 Israel acquired the "occupied territories." In 1948 Israel acquired life. The fighting raging now in 2006 -- between Israel and the "genocidal Islamism" (to quote the writer Yossi Klein Halevi) of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them -- is about whether that life should and will continue to exist.

Also, and more succintly: "The issue is, and has always been, Israel's existence. That is what is at stake." That's all for now folks.