Qana Massacre Shows Why Cease-Fire Must Come First

The White House has spent the last several days explaining to the world why it is important to resolve the underlying issues surrounding the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict before a cease-fire can go into effect. This is the same kind of thinking that left the administration without an occupation plan for Iraq. The bombing of about 60 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana shows why the cease-fire must precede any resolution of the conflict.

If President Bush had read Carl von Clausewitz’ On War rather than My Pet Goat, he would understand that war is, indeed, politics by other means. War is the use of violence to change a political situation when reason, negotiation and lesser displays of annoyance don’t work (or at least, that’s how it should be – although some prefer to jump right to the violence). War ends when one side is prepared to accept a political situation that it was not prepared to accept before the violence, or when both sides realize that the situation is not changing despite the violence.

Hezbollah believes, quite rightly, that Israel will never negotiate itself out of existence, but extinguishing Israel is Hezbollah’s big objective (along with dragging the Islamic world back into the 11th Century). Therefore, it has decided to adopt a state-of-war posture toward Israel. By the same token, Israel has decided that its own security depends on the elimination of Hezbollah or at least its physical removal from southern Lebanon, and it is quite prepared to kill as many non-Israelis as necessary to achieve that end. Thus, the current unpleasantness is clearly a political situation in which the actors are trying to achieve through violence what they believe cannot be changed any other way.

An objective observer, the rarest of birds in the Middle East (and indeed, quite possibly extinct in that environment), can tell immediately that neither side has the ability to achieve its end. Hezbollah is out-gunned and out-manned by Israel. Israel, though, lacks the ability to kill every member of Hezbollah because Israel’s actions recruit new members. On Saturday, both sides were starting to realize this and were beginning to claim victory nonetheless – the first move in a climb-down.

Then, Israel killed 54 people (mostly women and children) in the Lebanese town of Qana with a bomb that may or may not have been after a Hezbollah rocket launcher right outside the building that was hit. Suddenly, Dr. Rice is told not to come to Beirut by the Lebanese regime, the Arab media spent a day or two in hysteria over the kind of deaths that Baghdad sees almost every day, and the violence has indeed changed the political picture. It has moved a ceasefire further away without moving the final settlement forward.

So, in terms a reader of My Pet Goat can understand, the violence has to stop before the problem can be solved because the violence changes the situation that everyone is discussing. By adding more grievances to the equation, a final settlement becomes less, not more, likely.

© 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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