Behind
Bush’s “Truce” Plan:
The Drive Towards
A Wider Middle East War
By Bill Van Auken
08 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
US
President George W. Bush on Monday declared his full support for a US-French
United Nations resolution that dictates Israel’s terms to the
Lebanese people while allowing the Israeli military to indefinitely
continue its occupation and devastation of Lebanon.
This document, far from an
agreement for peace, represents one more step in widening the war initiated
by the Bush administration in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq into a
regional conflagration that poses an immense threat to working people
not only in the Middle East, but in the US and all over the world.
Speaking at his Crawford,
Texas ranch, Bush made it clear that his administration intended to
accept no substantive changes in the UN resolution, and that it was
particularly opposed to an amendment, advanced by the Lebanese government
and supported by the entire Arab world, specifying that any settlement
require the invading army of 10,000 Israeli troops to immediately withdraw
from Lebanon.
Standing by his side, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, who worked systematically over the past month
to block a ceasefire and ensure that the killing in Lebanon be allowed
to continue, belittled the objections of the Lebanese. “We understand
how emotional this is for the Lebanese,” she declared. “They’ve
been through a very difficult war.”
The UN document makes no
condemnation whatsoever of Israel’s blitzkrieg against Lebanon—supposedly
in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers—resulting
in the deaths of over a thousand Lebanese civilians, the wounding of
thousands more, the expulsion of one million Lebanese from their homes
and the decimation of the country’s infrastructure.
Nor does it call upon Israel
to relinquish its control of Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms territory,
an occupation that, under international law, makes Hezbollah’s
armed resistance a legitimate form of struggle.
The UN resolution amounts
to the kind of victor’s peace traditionally imposed on a nation
decisively defeated in war. In fact, despite the carnage Israel has
wreaked upon Lebanon, largely through the use of missiles, shells and
cluster bombs supplied by the US, Israel has failed to achieve its military
objectives or secure its grip on any Lebanese territory. Israel’s
military setbacks on the ground are the result of fierce opposition
by Hezbollah fighters.
Nor has Israel been able
to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks, the most deadly of which occurred
Sunday, killing 12 Israeli soldiers preparing to join the invasion of
Lebanon.
The demands set forth in
the draft resolution—that Hezbollah disarm and cease all military
operations while Israel continues occupying Lebanese territory and carrying
out “defensive” air strikes against defenseless civilians—are
completely unacceptable not only to Hezbollah, but also to the Lebanese
people and the Lebanese government, as well as the governments of Syria
and Iran.
After stonewalling efforts
to bring about an immediate ceasefire so as to allow its Israeli ally
to continue its offensive, Washington is now brushing aside all objections
by the Lebanese—in the name of “peace.” Thus, at his
Monday press conference, Bush declared hypocritically, “Everyone
wants the violence to stop.”
This is a lie. Washington
no more wants an end to the violence now than it did a month ago.
Nabih Berri, the speaker
of the Lebanese parliament, drew the correct assessment of the UN draft
resolution, declaring that by legitimizing Israel’s occupation
it would “open the door to never-ending war.” There is every
indication that “never-ending war” is precisely the strategy
of the Bush administration in the Middle East.
This is the real meaning
of Bush’s statement Monday that the UN resolution was designed
to get at “the root causes of the conflict.” By this he
did not mean addressing the grievances, stretching back nearly six decades,
of the Palestinian people, who were expelled from their homeland with
the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and then subjected to nearly
four decades of illegal and brutal occupation after Israel seized the
West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
Nor do the “root causes”
Bush has in mind include the century-old domination of the region by
Western imperialism—first British and then American—maintained
with the single-minded objective of installing pliant Arab regimes that
would insure a steady flow of oil at profitable rates, while suppressing
the aspirations of their own people.
For Bush and the right-wing
layers directing the affairs of the American government, the “root”
problem is popular resistance to both Israel’s land grabs and
the drive by the US to establish undisputed hegemony over this strategic
area of the globe.
The perverse and fraudulent
character of the UN resolution is epitomized by the fact that what purports
to be a truce agreement has been negotiated essentially between one
of the combatants—Israel—and its principal backer, the US.
The terms of the resolution,
which the Bush administration cooked up with the French government,
are intended to be unacceptable to both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government.
The aim is to place the onus on them for the policy being carried out
by Israel and the US—a continuation and escalation of the war
against the Lebanese people.
The reaction of the Israeli
government makes transparent the bogus character of the supposed truce
effort. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz told a parliamentary committee
Monday, “I gave an order that if within the coming days the diplomatic
process does not reach a conclusion, Israeli forces will carry out the
operations necessary to take control of Katyusha rocket launching sites
in every location.” The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), he added,
“will operate anywhere in Lebanon.”
This is a clear signal that
the IDF will be sent to clear out the population and occupy Lebanese
territory up to the Litani River and perhaps beyond. The logic of this
military campaign is yet another annexation of territory to Israel.
“No limits” on Israeli attacks
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert declared that he would place “no limits” on the IDF’s
use of force.
The Israeli daily Haaretz
quoted an unnamed senior military officer as saying that Israel now
plans to “attack strategic infrastructure targets and symbols
of the Lebanese government.” Another officer told the newspaper,
“It could be that at the end of the story, Lebanon will be dark
for a few years.”
The escalation of the Israeli
aggression was already evident on Monday, with the bombing of a crowded
shopping area in a southern suburb of Beirut located on the edge of
the city’s predominantly Christian district. The death toll was
put at 20 by the official Lebanese news agency, though more victims
were believed buried in the rubble. The air strike demolished a residential
building close to a shopping mall where many refugees had taken shelter.
Meanwhile, in south Lebanon,
the IDF announced a 10 p.m. curfew, warning that anyone on the streets
after that hour would be considered a terrorist and shot.
Washington has made it a
point of principle that it will have no contact with either Hezbollah
or the two nations with the strongest ties to Lebanon and its Shiite
population—Syria and Iran. Instead, it has sought to demonize
all three, laying the ideological groundwork for further wars of aggression.
Thus, Bush spoke of the UN
resolution serving to “prevent armed militias like Hezbollah and
its Iranian and Syrian sponsors from sparking another crisis.”
Asked by a reporter why Washington
refused to talk to either Syria or Iran, he replied, “I appreciate
people focusing on Syria and Iran, and we should, because Syria and
Iran sponsor and promote Hezbollah activities—all aimed at creating
chaos, all aimed at using terror to stop the advance of democracies.”
He added, for good measure, “The actions of Hezbollah through
its sponsors of Iran and Syria are trying to stop that advance of democracy.
Hezbollah launched this attack. Hezbollah is trying to create the chaos
necessary to stop the advance of peace.”
There is no reason to believe
that Bush knows anything more about Lebanon than he did about Iraq.
(According to one recently published account, he did not know before
the war that there were two branches of Islam—Shiite and Sunni).
But the reality is that Hezbollah is not some cat’s-paw of either
Syria or Iran, and neither government can control its actions.
It is a movement that grew
out of the Lebanese Shiite population’s resistance to the 18-year
Israeli occupation of their land. It gained immense prestige by succeeding
in expelling Israeli troops from Lebanese territory, and emerged as
a powerful movement that appealed to the aspirations of the Lebanese
Shiite population, historically the country’s most impoverished
and most politically disenfranchised layer.
In the most chilling section
of Bush’s remarks on Monday, he related the events in Lebanon
to his administration’s broader policy in the Middle East and
the so-called “global war on terrorism.”
He declared: “...[W]hat
the American people need to know is we’ve got a strategy—a
strategy for freedom in the Middle East which protects the American
people in the long run. And we’ve got a strategy to deal with
the situations that arise in the Middle East—first Lebanon; of
course, the Iranian nuclear weapon issue.”
He continued: “The
challenge in the 21st century is to remind people about the stakes,
and remind people that in moments of quiet, there’s still an Islamic
fascist group plotting, planning and trying to spread their ideology.
And one of the things that—one of the things that came out of
this unfortunate incident in the Middle East is a stark reminder that
there are those who want to stop the advance of liberty...”
Bush’s “strategy”
is to widen the wars for “regime change” in the Middle East
that began with the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When the American
president—whose closest allies in the region are the police state
regimes and absolutist monarchies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan—uses
the words “freedom” and “liberty,” he is talking
about the freedom of American banks and corporations to exercise exclusive
domination over Middle East and its oil wealth.
Facing a catastrophe in its
occupation of Iraq (with thousands of US forces now being sent back
into Baghdad to resecure the capital and confront its restive Shiite
population), the Bush administration has decided that the solution is
not to withdraw, but rather to launch new wars, not only in Lebanon,
but ultimately against Syria and Iran.
There is undoubtedly an element
of madness in this strategy of escalating militarism, but this is not
merely the lunacy of America’s dim-witted president and his advisors.
Rather, it reflects an irrational social system based on private ownership
of the planet’s productive forces and vital resources and the
division of a globally integrated world economy into rival nation states.
US policy is essentially
to utilize its military power to assert domination over the oil resources
of the Middle East and Central Asia, and thereby assure American capitalism
both a secure energy supply and the ability to dictate terms to its
economic rivals.
The turn to escalating militarism
is also driven by the profound internal contradictions of American society,
dominated by an unprecedented polarization between a wealthy elite and
the masses of working people, and faced with a growing prospect of economic
slump combined with rising inflation—a recipe for social explosions.
A military attack on Syria
and Iran has the gravest implications. With US military forces already
stretched to the limit by the failing imperialist adventure in Iraq,
a new war will inevitably bring with it the reinstitution of the draft,
forcing American young people to serve as cannon fodder for the conquest
of Iranian oil fields.
Moreover, a war against Iran
has the most deadly implications. A US attack would provoke an Iranian
response against Israel, and, in turn, a possible nuclear retaliation
by Israel. The path now being taken by US imperialism leads to the death
of millions.
The carnage in Lebanon has
demonstrated that there exists no genuine political opposition to this
turn towards global warfare within the US political establishment, with
the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, seeking to outdo the
Republicans in their support for Israel. At the same time, the draft
resolution produced by the US and France makes it clear, once again,
that the European bourgeoisie is incapable of mounting any opposition
to US militarism, and that the UN itself serves only as a tool for imperialist
policy.
The threat of a far wider
and more devastating war can be countered only through the independent
mobilization of the working class, in the US and internationally, based
on a common socialist program.