http://thecouriermail.com.au/extras/blogs/costello/2006/07/as-bad-as-it-gets.html
I appreciate the analysis, but don't entirely agree either. I think that Bush has strong views on how to deal with this situation, but he has a duty to let it pan within international convention: The US is politically charged in the middle east, whatever it does is wrong. The thing is, the UN is not functioning.
It wasn't the end of the world when Hamas won the Palestinian election. Fatah are also a terrorist organisation which prides itself on political horse trading. Thing is, Palestinians voted Hamas in the vain hope that they would not be corrupt like Fatah. Palestinians are neither stupid nor evil, but badly misled. Palestinian moderates have been eliminated over the years by extremists, and so there is, among Palestinian moderates, a circle of silence. The hope was that discipline of engaging in world politics would bring Palestinian politics into mainstream world affairs .. allowing compromise seen in Vietnam, China and India. This might still occur, but the murder and kidnapping of Israeli people has sidelined the hope for now.
Hezbollah wanted this confrontation, and probably thought they would be able to fire more than 300 of an estimated 18,000 rockets given by Iran. Hezbollah made this operation in conjunction with events in Palestine in high summer holiday season .. hoping to inconvenience Lebanese peoples from around the world.
Bush has an ace up his sleeve. Kofi is embarrassed, as Bush noted to Blair. The UN has not participated in the peace process, but behaved as a left leaning lobbyist intent on fighting Bush at politics. The result is poor advice and leadership with regards to Syria who might believe some of their extremist propaganda. Instead, Iraq is flowering, and moderate voices are achieving influential positions in the Arab world. And oil becomes less relivant as it becomes less available. Ten years from now, Kofi will be out of office, the world will be moving on and extremism in the arab world will be contained.
The efforts of Israelis, targetted against extremists that Lebanon still supports tacitly, if not explicitly, is not to punish Lebanese as Hezbollah wants, but to 'defang' Hezbollah. There are still battles to be fought, but the extremists have already lost .. they just don't know it yet.
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