In
The Face Of Bush's Lies,
It's Left To Assad To Tell The Truth
By Robert Fisk
16 August 2006
The
Independent
In
the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus, reality often seems a
long way away. But it was a sign of the times that President Bashar
al-Assad was able to bring the great and the good of Damascus to their
feet by the simple token of telling the truth - which no other Arab
leader has chosen to do these past five weeks: that the Lebanese Hizbollah
guerrilla army has, in effect, won this round of their war with Israel.
There was plenty of hyperbole
in the Assad speech. A conflict that has cost 1,000 Lebanese civilian
lives can hardly be called a "glorious battle" but he did
at least reflect more reality than his opposite number in Washington
who, driven by self-delusion or his love of Israel, claimed that Hizbollah
had been defeated in Lebanon.
Israel's "victory"
in Lebanon presumably has to be added to our own famous "victories"
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria and Iran, according to Mr Bush, were
responsible for the "suffering" of Lebanon - which contains
the seeds of truth since Hizbollah provoked this war by capturing two
Israeli soldiers and killing three others on 12 July - although it wasn't
the Syrian or Iranian air force that was slaughtering the convoys of
innocent refugee civilians in Lebanon. So it was that President Assad
must have enjoyed his little peroration in Damascus yesterday.
"This is a [American]
administration that adopts the principle of pre-emptive war that is
absolutely contradictory to the principle of peace," he said. "Consequently,
we don't accept peace soon or in the foreseeable future."
Mr Assad can say that again.
Indeed, there is no more sign that Hizbollah intends to "disarm"
under the terms of UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701 than
Israel is prepared to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and
withdraw from Arab territories it occupied in 1967.
However, it is clear that
President Assad now sees himself back at the centre of Arab power after
his army's humiliating retreat from Lebanon last year. There was no
more need for defeatism among Arabs, he said - a sentiment widely held
in the real Arab world but quite absent from President Bush's fantasy
Middle East.
That it should be Syria,
of all nations, which can state this to so much applause probably says
more about Washington than it does about Damascus. And it is, of course,
the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights - see UN Resolution
242 - that lies behind this whole disastrous war.
The truth is Israel opened
its attack on Lebanon by claiming the Lebanese government was responsible
for Hizbollah's attack - which it clearly was not - and that its military
actions would achieve the liberation of the captured soldiers.
This, the Israelis have signally
failed to do. The loss of 40 soldiers in just 36 hours and the successful
Hizbollah attacks against Israeli armour in Lebanon were a disaster
for the Israeli army.
The fact that Syria could
bellow about the "achievements" of Hizbollah while avoiding
the destruction of a blade of grass inside Syria suggests a cynicism
that has yet to be grasped inside the Arab world. But for now, Syria
has won.
Iran, as Hizbollah's principal
supporter, clearly thinks so too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who
usually talks far more than he thinks, condemned the US for supplying
Israel with the weapons it used on Lebanese civilians - perfectly true.
But he did not say Hizbollah's missiles come from a new-generation Iranian
arsenal that did not even exist during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. While
the US will be keen to assess the effectiveness of its weapons - albeit
largely used on civilians - no one should doubt that Iran will also
be assessing the success of its new Fajr missiles - and their effect
on the Israeli army.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited