Yehoshua Sagui, a former director of the Israeli military intelligence service, once indicated that the most developed and most complex weapon used by the Jewish state in its five wars, was the Arab Division, a remark that recalled what Moshe Sharett, a sometime foreign minister, used to say: “Here we live among tribes which have been brought together in very vulnerable entities”.
But Sharett is no longer alive to see how his views have collapsed like a sand castle or a house of cards in the face of the determination of the men of Hezballah in an unequal confrontation.
Lebanese diplomacy, under the impetus of an Arab-French dynamic, played the fundamental role in obtaining Resolution 1701, which serves the interests of Lebanon, despite the breaches and gaps it contains. It can put an end to the war of massacres, deploy the Army to the South and fill the void caused by the absence of the state. When the dialogue conference was meeting, we believed that a unanimity was going to take shape on the principle of the centralization of the state. Unfortunately, the dialoguers disappointed the Lebanese, for nothing tangible emerged from the conference.
After the liberation of the South from occupation in 2000, we brandished the slogan: “All the South to the state, and all the state to the South!” Six years after the liberation and a decade and a half after the end of the war and the peace of Taef, Lebanon remains an isolated nation and a state complaining of the weapons it does not possess.
The United Nations sent a secret memorandum to Prime Minister Fuad Saniora drawing his attention to the entry of weapons and electronic computers into Lebanon. A unit of the Army stopped a truck carrying these articles, then let it continue on its way to South Lebanon. When the ambassador of a great power protested, the Army’s Orientation Department issued a communiqué saying that the military establishment was acting in accordance with a statement by the government to the effect that it was committed to supporting the Resistance until the liberation of every last inch of South Lebanon, an allusion to the Shebaa Farms, to which Resolution 1701 makes no reference. We know that the United Nations has voted 25 resolutions on the Palestinian cause since 1947, and that few of them have ever been implemented. The knot before July 12 and after Resolution 1701, 31 days after the outbreak of hostilities, is the same: the weapons of Hezballah. At the moment these lines are being written, the Council of Ministers, convened exceptionally on Sunday, August 13, was adjourned because of differences within the cabinet on this question. Twenty-four hours before this adjournment, President Bush, in a telephone call to Prime Minister Saniora, insisted on the necessity of dismantling Hezballah’s military wing and its transformation into a political party, like the other parties active on the scene. Saniora promised him to act and he consulted Speaker Berri “in order to send the message to Sayyed Nasrallah”. I am convinced that this subject is premature while the southern suburbs were exposed, until the evening of Sunday, August 13, to raids in which internationally-banned percussion bombs were being used. Sayyed Nasrallah, who showed his greatness in his resistance, will be equally great if he offers the state the fruits and gains of his combat, at the time when the bells of his resurrection sound and when he will once again assume his role.
Some observers raise the matter of the mid-term elections in the US, when the Democrat donkey and the Republican elephant will vie to obtain majorities in the Senate and the House. Bush fears he will be transformed into a lame duck if the Democrats gain a majority, and that is why he has hardened his position, politically and militarily, working for a long-term strategy looking beyond Hezballah.
The State of the Union address of 2006 was undoubtedly a propaganda manifesto paving the way for the presidential election, a speech in which Bush assumed the mantle not of Martin Luther King but of Joseph Goebbels. From it observers have pointed out 10 passages in the address dealing with the doctrine of preventive war, which led the Americans to Baghdad. They may in future move on to other Arab capitals, especially as Bush has declared that he doesn’t need “a permission slip” to launch a war intended to protect American security. He spoke of the “Greater Middle East” in these terms: “As long as the Middle East is a place for hope and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that will threaten the security of America and of our friends”.
The touch and fingerprints of Karl Rove, principal advisor at the White House, are all over the speech, which made Bush a warrior on several fronts. And it was observed that the speech neglected pressing domestic issues, stressing security at the expense of matters that preoccupied millions of Americans in their daily lives. John Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate, remarked, “I think there are two entirely different worlds: the world the president is speaking of, and the world where most Americans live”. And John Edwards, the Democrat vice-presidential candidate, added, “The state of the Union looks rosy from the White House balcony or in the view of George Bush’s rich backers, but ordinary wage earners will realize that there is little room for compassion in the president’s program”.
President Bush appears to be acting in accordance with the pillars of his strategy. He has already spoken of the “axis of evil”, then of the “Iranian danger”. He made no mention of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in his latest speech, thus lifting the pressure from Israel and inscribing its war in his campaign against terrorism, in the hope no doubt of obtaining Jewish votes.
Has the American glacier become so warm as to reach boiling point? The Lebanese earthquake confirms it.
 
 

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