Why Hurry?

21 July 2006



Rice Headed to Middle East Later Rather Than Sooner

The State Department has announced that Secretary of State neoCondoleezza Rice will visit the Middle East in an attempt to end the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting. However, there isn’t any rush. The trip is set for sometime next week. And the world isn’t sure which leaders she’ll be meeting. Washington is still working on that. The smart money says she won’t be going to Damascus or Tehran, where all the trouble has started, but then, peace isn’t the objective.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack laid out America’s plans, to the extent that they exist. She won’t be shuttling between capitals like Henry Kissinger used to do, and she isn’t interested in stopping the killing per se. Mr. McCormack told the press, “You’re not going to see a return to the kind of diplomacy, I think, that we’ve seen before where you try to negotiate an end to the violence that leaves the parties in place and where you have status quo [sic].”

In other words, there isn’t going to be a ceasefire until certain political and military realities change. The administration has tacitly approved the Israeli response to the kidnapping/capturing of some of its soldiers with its silence. Talk of letting the “Zionist entity,” as Hezbollah calls Israel, stomp all over southern Lebanon for another week hasn’t been squelched by any of the Busheviks. Israel's ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, said on Tuesday, “Certainly right now it is not the time. We have to see that there is a situation whereby the conditions are conducive for her trip and I'm afraid right now this is not the case.”

The Busheviks are dreaming of Israel wiping out Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon quickly, followed by the deployment of the Lebanese Army into the purged area. Then, they believe they can negotiate with the Beirut government about whatever there is to discuss. There are a couple of assumptions in all of this that make one wonder if they have learned anything from the last 5 years. Can Israel wipe out Hezbollah without entering Syria with ground forces (and really making a mess of things)? Will the Lebanese government, which has two Hezbollah ministers, play along in deploying its Syrian-infiltrated army? Will the Arab and Muslim populations forgive the Israeli government for the hundreds of civilians it has killed (despite the country’s best efforts to minimize such deaths)?

In light of this, Dr. Rice’s visit to the Middle East is window-dressing. She is going to talk to the Israelis and tell them that they can stop when they get tired, but America isn’t going to “force” them into a cease-fire. She won’t look in on Mr. Assad in Syria or Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran, because Washington wants to “isolate” them. Since peace can only be made with one’s rivals and enemies and not with one’s friends, one wonders precisely what she hopes to achieve except some public relations cover.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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