|
| |
The Times, published
July21st. 2006
Destroy Hezbollah, Not Lebanon.
By David Howell and Elizabeth Symons
(Lord Howell is Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Lords and former Chairman
of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Baroness Symons is formerly
Deputy Government Leader in the Lords and was Minister of State in the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office from 1997 to 2005)
There is no milk.
There is not much of anything else either. The shelves in the stores have been
swept clean, petrol is scarce and power supplies are being cut. Hospitals are on
stand by power but that cannot last long. Medical supply deliveries have
stopped. With ports, airports, transport systems bombed almost all supply chains
have been broken. Little is getting through.
This is not the suburbs of South Beirut where Hezbollah reigns and where truly
bad men, with odious motives, still spurred on by Syria, have decided to break
with Lebanese Government attempts at consensus-building and instead to declare
all-out war on Israel , regardless of the consequences for Lebanon, for Lebanese
or Israeli citizens or anybody else.
In those areas poison stalks the side streets and the Israelis have full
justification for trying every means to neutralise the machinery of terror.
But this is different. This is the situation in the mountain towns to the north
of Beirut , the so-called Christian areas, although in fact where all religions
live peacefully and where those Lebanese who have any time left to think hate
Hezbollah violence and contempt for human rights, were glad to see the Syrians
go and where people longed to see their fledgling democratic Government bring
the Amal and Hezbollah factions slowly to into dialogue and common cause.
Now the bombs are falling on them, too, and the infrastructure of civilised
existence, so painfully sewn together after years of civil war , has again been
swept away . Israel has now set itself not just against Hezbollah but against
the entire Lebanese people and the Lebanese state. Incredibly, the elected
Lebanese Government, Israel’s neighbour and the only other democracy in the
region, has been declared Israel’s foe . Its very attempts to bring Hezbollah
representatives into the process of government have been depicted not merely as
tolerance of, but actual collaboration with terror , giving credibility to
militants and killers, for which Israel holds Lebanon responsible . The state of
Lebanon must therefore now be punished. From the Israeli military the word seems
to have gone out ‘Lebanon delenda est’.
The thinking is fundamentally flawed. Even after the Syrians went, following the
upsurge of popular protest against the murder of Rafiq Hariri, the new Lebanese
establishment never had anything like enough power and control to disarm the
Hezbollah militia . Any frontal attempt to do so would have taken Lebanon back
into full, factional, civil war at breakneck speed. Its only way forward was
through patient, gradual, subtle and often covert manoeuvring .
All that has been now been overturned and set at nought. When the bombing stops
the old civil war is highly likely to resume amidst the rubble, with the state
of Lebanon seemingly for ever cursed and finally fragmenting.
The consequences for Israel will now be even more devastating than the Katyusha
rockets , as will the consequences for peace in Gaza and for the all the hopes
of the Quartet’s road map. And the ripples will be wider still. Already voices
in Turkey are urging a break with Israel – yet another friend gone – while a
collapsed Lebanon, although a small state, will leave an almighty hole into
which the Syrians will once again pour, with the Iranians riding beside them.
The impact will go further. America’s reputation in the area is of course
already at zero, with the conviction, almost universal , even if only half true,
that Israel is the proxy of the United States and relies on its technological
weapons superiority (although that may now be eroding). But Britain, which
always had a reputation greater wisdom in the region, can still be the friend of
small nations, the friends of the resurgent Lebanon and the friend of moderation
and restraint. But it runs a real risk of acquiring a new and less noble image
if it stands aside while America gives ‘the green light’ for the Israeli
destruction to carry on and on.
There is still time to correct this, to tell Israel that it is right to strike
against Hezbollah but wrong to pulverise little Lebanon – that there is
understanding of the grievous provocation which Hezbollah offers, egged on at
every turn by Syria and by Iran, but no ‘green light’ for destroying a small
,beautiful neighbouring nation in response.
Instead , while actual Israeli-Lebanese co-operation against Hezbollah may be
wishing for too much, the creative and shrewd minds in Jerusalem of which there
are many, should be turning to the kind of international support and presence
Israel needs to make their northern border safe from murderous attacks . Perhaps
such a force should draw on Muslim states and Arab neighbours , who may dislike
Israel but dislike Hezbollah even more, as well as the ill-intentioned forces
behind it in Damascus and Teheran.
But whichever path is chosen, the worst of all is the one that leaves Lebanon is
ruins, its people fleeing or dying and power lying in the gutter , waiting to be
picked up by those who want more terror and more turmoil. That cannot be right.
Ends
|
