08/07/06 “The Independent” — — So the great and the good on the East River laboured at the United Nations Security Council – and brought forth a lemon. You could almost hear the Lebanese groan at this draft resolution, a document of such bias and mendacity that a close Lebanese friend read carefully through it yesterday, cursed and uttered the immortal question: “Don’t these bastards learn anything from history?”

And there it all was again, the warmed-up peace proposals of Israel’s 1982 invasion, full of buffer zones and disarmament and “strict respect by all parties” – a rousing chortle here, no doubt, from Hizbollah members – and the need for Lebanese sovereignty. It didn’t even demand the withdrawal of Israeli forces, a point that Walid Moallem, Syria’s Foreign Minister – and the man the Americans will eventually have to negotiate with – seized upon with more than alacrity. It was a dead UN resolution without a total Israeli retreat, he said on a strategic trip to Beirut.

A close analysis of the American-French draft – the fingerprints of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, were almost smudging the paragraphs – showed just who is running Washington’s Middle East policy: Israel. And one wondered how even Tony Blair would want to associate himself with this nonsense. It made no reference to the obscenely disproportionate violence employed by Israel – just a sleek reference to “hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides” – and it made only passing reference to Hizbollah’s demand that it would only release the two Israeli soldiers it captured on 12 July in return for Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.

The Security Council said it was “mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue [sic] of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel”. I bet Hizbollah were impressed by the “mindful” bit, not to mention the “sensitivity” and the soft, slippery word “settle” – an issue which can be “settled” in maybe 20 years’ time. Then came the real coup de grāce. A demand for the “total cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks” and the “immediate cessation” by Israel of “all offensive military operations”. Bit of a problem there, as Hizbollah spotted at once. They have to lay down their arms.

informationclearinghouse.info

Israel running US or vice-versa? Israel is used as the vicious bulldog everybody loves to hate.

The draft UN resolution

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