UN
Resolution On Lebanon:
Blueprint For Intensified War
And Colonial Occupation
By Bill Van Auken
07 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
US-French resolution that is to be voted on by the United Nations Security
Council early this week represents an imperialist diktat to the people
of Lebanon and an attempt by Washington to legitimize and consummate
the geo-strategic goals pursued in the last month of US-Israeli war
of aggression.
It is deliberately written
in such a provocative manner as to ensure its rejection not only by
Hezbollah, but by the Lebanese government itself. Not a single Lebanese
grievance is addressed. What it demands, essentially, is that Hezbollah
enter a suicide pact with its enemies and that Lebanon accepts its transformation
into a semi-colony.
The aim is to provide prior
justification for the continued massacre of the Lebanese people. The
inevitable mantra that will be played out by government officials and
in the mass media in the days and weeks ahead will be that bleeding
Lebanon has only itself to blame for its suffering, because it would
not accept “peace.”
National Security Advisor
Steve Hadley spelled this out, declaring at a press conference Sunday
that a rejection of the resolution “will tell you something about
who wants peace and who does not, and that will be a clarifying moment.”
Both US and Israeli officials
have made it clear that this resolution signals not an end to the carnage
and destruction in Lebanon, but rather their brutal escalation.
Speaking at President Bush’s
ranch in Crawford Texas, Sunday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
stressed that fighting would likely continue for “some time to
come.” She said that while she hoped to see “an end to large-scale
violence” in the short run, “these things take a while to
wind down.”
During the last month of
slaughter, Rice has engaged in a ghoulish version of “shuttle
diplomacy” aimed not at halting the bloodshed, but at staving
off calls for a cease-fire and allowing the Israeli military to continue
its work of demolishing Lebanon’s infrastructure and using mass
terror to drive the impoverished Shiite population out of south Lebanon.
It is clear that the US-French
UN resolution is aimed at achieving essentially the same objectives.
At Washington’s insistence, it calls not for an immediate cease-fire,
but only for a “cessation of hostilities” within an unspecified
time frame.
While demanding an end to
all military activity by Hezbollah, the document calls upon Israel merely
to halt “all offensive military operations,” a vague formulation
that would essentially allow the Israeli Defense Forces to continue
their scorched-earth campaign in Lebanon under the pretext of “self-defense.”
It makes no demand for the
immediate withdrawal of the more than 10,000 Israeli troops that have
invaded Lebanese territory nor even proposes any timetable for their
leaving the country.
This one-sided document demands
the “unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers,”
while only “encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue
of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel.”
The resolution essentially
imposes the stated US-Israeli war aims, demanding the “establishment
between the Blue Line and the Litani river...an area free of any armed
personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed
and security forces and of UN mandated international forces” as
well as the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon deployed
in this area.” It provides no prescription, however, for ending
Israeli occupation of either the Lebanese Shebaa farms region or the
Syrian Golan Heights.
One section of the document
provides for “reopening airports and harbors [now closed down
as a result of Israeli bombardment and an air and naval blockade] for
verifiably and purely civilian purposes.” What is the meaning
of such verification? Essentially, what is being spelled out is that
the UN resolution is aimed at robbing Lebanon of any semblance of sovereignty
and reducing it to a semi-colonial protectorate dominated by Washington
and Israel.
Meanwhile, once the Security
Council passes this measure, a second resolution is to be prepared spelling
out the composition and rules of engagement of a UN “peace-keeping”
force. This force is expected to consist of at least 15,000 combat troops—up
to a third of them French—backed by armor, which will be authorized
to utilize massive and deadly force to disarm and expel the Hezbollah
resistance fighters from the proposed buffer zone south of the Litani
River.
According to published reports,
agreement on this second resolution could take as much as another two
weeks of talks at the UN, during which Israel will continue its war
of annihilation against Lebanon. Washington has engineered the diplomatic
process at the UN precisely in order to provide Israel with the opportunity
to continue its assault. Asked on Sunday whether President Bush believed
there was still a long way to go before the fighting ended, White House
spokesman Tony Snow answered, “I don’t think he has any
delusions about what lies ahead.”
Senior Israeli officials
reacted to the draft resolution with either indifference or vows to
intensify the war against Lebanon. Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog, a
member of the security cabinet, indicated that the proposed UN measure
would prompt an immediate acceleration of Israeli attacks. “Until
the resolution enters into force, the army will continue to act,”
he said in an Israeli television interview. “We have the coming
days for lots of military moves. But we have to realize the timetable
is getting shorter. It is a fact that we have to accept and act in accordance
with.”
Justice Minister Haim Ramon,
speaking on army radio, dismissed the significance of the resolution.
“This is just a draft,” he said. “So we must continue
fighting ... We still have goals to achieve militarily.” He added
that Israel would continue its military operations in south Lebanon
until the UN security force was deployed in the area.
Continued decimation of south Lebanon
There was every indication
that Israel has already begun this escalation. Over the weekend it carried
out a massive bombardment of at least 15 villages in an area along the
border, leveling most of them. One village, Aitaroun, was pounded by
a barrage of over 2,000 shells. Israel’s immediate aim is to carve
out a four-mile deep “security zone” along its border by
driving out all its inhabitants.
While the UN resolution calls
for “facilitating the safe return of displaced persons,”
the Israeli Defense Forces are already creating facts on the ground
by turning much of south Lebanon into uninhabitable rubble. Israel is
conducting a massive operation in ethnic cleansing, turning the estimated
one million Lebanese driven from their homes into permanent refugees
and forcibly removing the impoverished Shiite population from their
land.
In its latest warning of
mass slaughter the Israeli military dropped leaflets threatening to
carry out a bombardment of the port of Sidon, a city with a pre-war
population of 100,000, which has been swelled substantially by refugees
pouring in from other parts of the devastated south. Many had seen it
as a safe haven because it is predominantly Sunni.
The Lebanese government rejected
the US-French resolution, calling for its amendment to include the demand
for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon.
A government source told
Agence France-Presse that the resolution as it currently stands “will
not resolve the crisis neither for the good of Lebanon or for Israel.
Israel will not have a guarantee of secure frontiers and Lebanon will
not recover all its occupied territory.” The official added that
the Lebanese government could not demand that Hezbollah lay down its
arms as long as its territory remained under Israeli occupation.
Lebanon’s Energy Minister
Mohammed Fneish, a member of Hezbollah made the same point. “We
are in a defense situation,” he said. “When the Israeli
aggression ceases, very simply, we will stop (fighting) on condition
that no Israeli soldier remains inside Lebanese land.”
By the count of the government
in Beirut, over 1,000 Lebanese civilians have been killed, while many
hundreds more are believed buried beneath the rubble of homes and apartment
buildings demolished by Israeli air strikes and bombardments. The ratio
of Lebanese to Israeli civilian casualties stands at 30 to 1, yet the
UN resolution treats Hezbollah as the principal source of aggression.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials
speak openly of assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a
war aim.
The criminality and cynicism
of Washington’s diplomacy found clearest expression in Secretary
of State Rice’s explanation of why the war against Lebanon can
be expected to go on for weeks more, with Washington’s approval.
“We’re trying to deal with a problem that has been festering
and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years, and so it’s
not going to be solved by one resolution in the Security Council,”
she declared.
This “festering”
problem is not, in the eyes of Washington, the continuous Israeli seizure
of land and use of military force against neighboring Arab countries,
the plight of the Palestinians expelled from their homeland and subjected
to decades of occupation or Israel’s constant flouting of international
law and United Nations resolution. On the contrary, the problem is the
failure of Israel’s 18-year occupation to defeat the Lebanese
masses and the emergence of a powerful resistance movement. This is
what Washington now proposes to crush by military force as part of its
drive to assert US hegemony over the entire Middle East.
There is a strong element
of desperation behind this strategy. US imperialism confronts deepening
debacles in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There is as well growing concern
within both US and Israeli ruling circles that the current intervention
in Lebanon is confronting far greater resistance than had ever been
anticipated, and that support within the Israeli population itself for
the war is waning. In this sense, the UN resolution represents something
of an insurance policy, proposing the formation of a “multinational
force” that can be sent in to realize US-Israeli aims if the IDF
proves inadequate for the task.
The collaboration of France
in this enterprise has an unmistakable significance. Paris has reportedly
offered to provide thousands of its own troops for this effort. The
government of Jacques Chirac dropped its initial demand for a resolution
demanding an immediate cease-fire and has now accommodated itself to
the US-Israeli strategy of continuing the slaughter in Lebanon under
the cover of the UN “peace effort.”
The French government has
developed a working relationship with Washington over the course of
the last few years in relation to Lebanon, co-authoring the 2004 UN
resolution demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country
and co-sponsoring with the Bush administration the so-called “Cedar
Revolution” that followed the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri, with the aim of installing a pro-Western government.
As the former colonial power
in Lebanon, France has no principled disagreements with the American
Middle East strategy, it is merely asserting its own interests there
and throughout the region. No doubt, it also hopes through its involvement
to stave off a broader US “preemptive war” against Iran,
where European capital has significant interests and which provides
a substantial share of Europe’s energy supplies.
This policy of appeasement
of US militarism will do nothing to deter Washington from widening its
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan into a broader regional war that
threatens to engulf the entire planet. US imperialism is determined
to established its unfettered control over the world’s energy
resources—including those of Iran, which possesses the second
largest supplies of oil and gas, and from which American corporations
have been excluded by Washington’s more than quarter-century embargo
against the country.
The US-French resolution
on Lebanon has also exposed, yet again, the United Nations as a pliant
tool of US and world imperialism. Its inability to halt the carnage
in Lebanon, followed now by its blatant complicity in its continuation
and escalation, recalls nothing so much as the League of Nations standing
aside as fascist Italy conquered Ethiopia and imperial Japan ravaged
China in the 1930s.
The struggle against the
criminal military aggression now being waged against the peoples of
Lebanon and Iraq and the fight against the growing danger of a far wider
conflagration in the Middle East and internationally can be waged only
on the basis of the independent mobilization of working people internationally
on the basis of a common program directed against the economic and social
system that produces war—capitalism.