Why is the UN still in Hezbollahistan?

This was my first thought when I heard that 4 UN “observers” were killed by Israeli fire, yesterday. And, as so often happens, Wretchard, at The Belmont Club, answered my question. This article uses the UN’s own press releases make the obvious case that the IDF did not intentionally target the UN as UN President Kofi Annan claims.

“Considering the fact that UNIFIL peacekeeping mission was a dead-letter it should naturally be asked why Kofi Annan, as their ultimate commander has seen fit to keep them in a position of danger where their only chance of safety actually depends on accurate targeting by the IDF. Their positions are manifestly so close to the Hezbollah; their convoys so at risk at being confused with mobile Hezbollah forces that only by the grace of God and the accuracy of the IDF have fatalities been avoided until now. They were willing to take the risk. Annan was willing to make the hay. You be the judge of Kofi Annan's competence both in the care of his men and with respect to the accusation he has made against the IDF.”

Any of this sounds familiar?

These clips are from Wikipedia’s Entry on Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990)

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PLO attacks from Lebanon into Israel in 1977 and 1978 escalated tensions between the countries. On 11 March 1978, eleven Fatah militants landed on a beach in northern Israel and proceeded to hijack two buses full of passengers on Haifa - Tel-Aviv road, shooting at passing vehicles. They killed 37 and wounded 76 Israelis before being killed in the firefight with the Israeli forces. [1] Israel invaded Lebanon four days later in Operation Litani. The Israeli Army occupied most of the area south of the Litani River, resulting in the evacuation of at least 100,000 Lebanese (Smith, op. cit., 356), as well as approximately 2,000 deaths (Newsweek, 27 March 1978; Time, 3 April 1978; cited in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, p. 485 n115). The UN Security Council passed Resolution 425 calling for immediate Israeli withdrawal and creating the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), charged with maintaining peace.

Israeli forces withdrew later in 1978, but retained control of the southern region by managing a 12-mile wide "security zone" along the border. To hold these positions, Israel installed the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Christian-Shi'a proxy militia under the leadership of Major Saad Haddad. Israel liberally supplied the SLA with arms and resources, and posted "advisors" to strengthen and direct the militia.

Violent exchanges resumed between the PLO, Israel, and the SLA, with the PLO attacking SLA positions and firing rockets into northern Israel, Israel conducting air raids against PLO positions, and the SLA continuing its efforts to consolidate power in the border region.

In August (1981), Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was re-elected, and in September, Begin and his defense minister Ariel Sharon began to lay plans for a second invasion of Lebanon for the purpose of driving out the PLO. Sharon's intention was to "destroy the PLO military infrastructure and, if possible, the PLO leadership itself; this would mean attacking West Beirut, where the PLO headquarters and command bunkers were located"
srael launched Operation Peace for Galilee on June 6, 1982, attacking PLO bases in Lebanon… Sharon described it as a plan to advance 40 kilometers into Lebanon, demolish PLO strongholds, and establish an expanded security zone that would put northern Israel out of range of PLO rockets.

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UN resolutions:

After the invasion had begun, the UN Security Council passed a further resolution on 6 June 1982, UNSCR 509, which reaffirms UNSCR 508 and "demands that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon" [3]. Thus far the US had not used its veto. However, on 8 June 1982, the US vetoed a proposed resolution that "reiterates [the] demand that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon" [4], thereby giving implicit assent to the Israeli invasion.

On 26 June, a UN Security Council resolution was proposed that "demands the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli forces engaged round Beirut, to a distance of 10 kilometres from the periphery of that city, as a first step towards the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, and the simultaneous withdrawal of the Palestinian armed forces from Beirut, which shall retire to the existing camps" [7]; the United States vetoed the resolution because it was "a transparent attempt to preserve the P.L.O. as a viable political force"

By September,… Israeli forces had pulled out from all but the southern security zone. The IDF would remain in this zone, in violation of UN Security Council resolution 425, until the 2000.

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And this sounds like Harriri Lebanese Prime Minister recently assasinated by Syria)

The Taif Agreement of 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the fighting… The agreement provided a large role for Syria in Lebanese affairs. Returning to Lebanon, they ratified the agreement on November 4 and elected Rene Mouawad as President the following day. Military leader Michel Aoun in East Beirut refused to accept Mouawad, and denounced the Taif Agreement.

Mouawad was assassinated 16 days later in a car bombing…

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Are we heading here, again? Not if the Israeli's get their way, and if they go all the way this time, regardless of UN resolutions. Why not ignore the UN? Everyone else does. And what has happens to them???

Haven’t we been here before?

This seems like a really bad idea:

“BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on Tuesday for establishing a strong international force in Lebanon…”

This will not work. It didn’t work back in 1978, culminating in the attack on the US Marine Barracks in Beirut. And it wasn’t working up until the hostilities started 6 days ago:

“Annan underscored Tuesday that the new force would have to be larger and stronger than a long-established U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, which currently numbers some 2,000 troops and which has long been viewed by all sides in the Middle East as ineffectual and lacking a strong mandate.”

Did you know there was already a UN force in Hezbollah country? A "international force" will not work because they will not have the permission to be in control. Hezbollah will not negotiate. They will kill the UN force if the UN force gets in their way. Their motto is “you are with us or you are against us.” Sound familiar? The only way to solve this is the ugly way – the way Israel is handling it now – the way we are handling Iraq. Elimination of those who have sworn to the eradication of the Jews and installation of a democratic government is the only solution. It’s Iraq all over again. It will be hard. It will be bloody. It will be long. But it is the only way to put an end to regions like southern Lebanon. There should be no cease-fire for years. Help Lebanon get control of their southern state. But no cease-fire. Hezbollah has never abided by a cease-fire, and never will. Placing troops in harms way will only get them killed. Send them in with a mission like Iraq, and they have a fighting chance.

It's getting ugly....

There is definitely a surge of scary stuff happening right now. The latest is that Israel, who had to make a stand against Hamas, in now headed for war with Hezbollah. (Hezbollah captures two Israeli soldiers).

This along with:
North Korean missiles and Japan discussing preemptive attacks
Iranian nuclear weapons program
Difficulties in Afghanistan
Terror in India
Hard times in Baghdad
Another terror plot on Manhattan following the Miami cell bust

Things are looking bleak. Time to get tough and remember that we are at war with evil.

Evil:
North Korean - Starving a million of its citizens
Iran - Wants to wipe Israel from the face of the earth
Afghanistan - mired in the Stone Age
Baghdad - Civil war
Manhattan/Miami - They still want to kill us

I don't think President Bush has gone soft, though. There's a lot of talk about how he is pushing negotiations when The Bush Doctrine says that we don't wait if there is a threat. I believe he will still act if there is a threat. He will not hesitate even though he has been lambasted over Iraq. He is true to the belief that his #1 job is to protect America. If/When he believes we are in danger from North Korea or Iran, he will take action. Until then, he will pursue a peaceful solution as we did with Iraq. The short-term memory society (STMS) forgets that we negotiated with Saddam for 11 years before we had to act. We are doing the same with North Korea and Iran. If we do have to act, I don't expect this STMS to remember his efforts to negotiate. The bottom line is that he doesn't care what the STMS thinks. He is doing what is right. He's trying to solve is peacefully. And he's trying to make regional parties take responsibility for their neighbors so that the US doesn't have to play the role of World Police. Give him credit. Give him time. He will protect.

Still Winning: Miami Terror Cell Busted

Another success by our Department of Homeland Security. DHS gets a lot of criticism and much of it is due. We always want to be improving. But we also have to praise and acknowledge that DHS has been very successful. It would be naive to say that DHS has not had a hand in keeping the homeland safe from a major attack since 9/11. And this Miami bust is another success. I hope to see some praise out there for the men and women who are putting their lives on the line to keep our homeland safe. And a counter to the NYT continuing to leak stories that aide the terrorists, we should be shouting from the roof-tops to the terrorists, "WE CAN INFILTRATE YOU!" Nothing will slow an organization like paranoia.

Blogs of War has a great round-up of this story:

"The group has been under surveillance for some time and was infilitrated by a government informant who allegedly led them to believe he was an Islamic radical."

Thank you DHS. Keep up the good Work.

PS. Anyone here what these terrorist's motives were? Oh, They were Muslim? Who wold have guessed? CNN

"Named in the indictment is Narseal Batiste, who allegedly told a federal undercover agent who he thought was a member of al Qaeda that he was organizing a mission to build an Islamic army to wage a jihad in the United States."

What many are thinking but are afraid to say

These quotes are from a Front Page article. It basically describes how I see the opposition to the war.

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As the fall elections approach, the Democrats have formally unveiled their platform for the war in Iraq: snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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For the first time in American history, a major political party wants America to run from a war we are winning.
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Democrat leaders would have us believe that their present defeatism, which they labor cynically to present as statecraft, is a rueful acknowledgement of facts on the ground in Iraq. They wanted the U.S. to succeed, but because of Bush’s bellicose mendacity they were forced to reconsider their support.
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Given such views as these—the Democrats’ version of bedrock principles—the difficulties the U.S. has experienced in Iraq have been for them a wish fulfilling fantasy. Their present position—America was foredoomed to fail—is just one short step away from Noam Chomsky’s position—America had it coming.
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For the Bush administration and the coalition troops in Iraq the battles have been for Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Basra, all engagements with the enemy in the field. For the Democrats and their media allies it has been Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Haditha and Niger, all behind-the-lines battles against our troops and their commander-in-chief.
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It is hard not to conclude that the Democrats want America to be defeated in Iraq and that it is not only their electoral opportunism but their worldview that demands it. This shows how different the Democratic Party is from what it was a generation ago when its stalwarts assumed the moral leadership in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The current Democrats bear no kinship to the John F. Kennedys, Hubert Humphreys and Scoop Jacksons who saw this prior conflict in the same black and white terms as Bush does the present conflict, and whose disheartening moments were far bleaker than the setbacks the U.S. has experienced in Iraq. Such men would be read out of the Democratic Party today and reviled as yahoos for their patriotism.
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From the beginning of this war they have waited impatiently – if not eagerly -- for U.S. troops to sink in a desert “quagmire.”
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Hanoi’s General Nguyen Giap, the Democrats’ Clausewtiz, famously said that his country could not win on the field of battle but would win in the streets of America. Divide politically and conquer militarily. That is what happened then; that is what the Democrats’ leaders are working to make happen now.

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GO read the rest....

Overcoming

Michael Barone at Opinion Journal:

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.

Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.

Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.

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Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

(accent mine)
(via Instapundit)

GLOBAL War on Terror

The Canadian terror cell recently eliminated seems to have global connections. Canadian cell with 3 tons of fertilizer, London chemical weapons factory, Georgia and NYC terrorist arrested, all in a few days. Powerline quotes National Post:

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A Canadian counter-terrorism investigation that led to the arrests of 17 people accused of plotting bombings in Ontario is linked to probes in a half-dozen countries, the National Post has learned.

Well before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh.

The six-month RCMP investigation, called Project OSage, is one of several overlapping probes that include an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar.

The Toronto busts are linked to arrests that began last August at a Canadian border post near Niagara Falls and continued in October in Sarajevo, London and Scandinavia, and earlier this year in New York and Georgia.

The FBI confirmed Saturday the arrests were related to the recent indictments in the U.S. of Ehsanul Sadequee and Syed Ahmed, who are accused of meeting with extremists in Toronto last March to discuss terrorist training and plots.

The intricate web of connections between Toronto, London, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Dhaka, and elsewhere illustrates the challenge confronting counter-terrorism investigators almost five years after 9/11.
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This is a reminder of how global the war on terror is, and it is far from over. We should also take from this story, the excellent communication and global coordination of the authorities in these free nations to work together to eliminate these threats.. Nice work, and Thank You for your vigilance.

Foundation for Victory

I haven't read President Bush's speech that he gave at West Point, this year, but I've heard several inferences to it. I have read this piece at The Belmont Club and it has encouraged me to make time to read the president's speech. We need more history lessons like the one Bush gave. And we need more debate about such lessons. Unfortunately, it seems as thought, when a relevant lesson is presented, it often get buried under more important stories like The Bikini Strangler

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President Bush's May 27 commencement address at West Point lays out, maybe not for the first time but more clearly than previously, his understanding and proposed roadmap to today's "long war" (hat tip: Austin Bay). The metaphor he invokes to describe what's been called the War on Terror is the Cold War. The Cold War is the last "Big One" of which large numbers of people still have a first hand memory. Only a slowly shrinking number of old people can actually remember the Second World War. But Vietnam, Checkpoint Charlie, Chrome Dome and Cuban Missile crisis are within living memory and it is on this that Bush hangs his rhetorical hook by recalling the first five years after World War 2.

"In 1947, communist forces were threatening Greece and Turkey, the reconstruction of Germany was faltering, mass starvation was setting in across Europe. In 1948, Czechoslovakia fell to communism; France and Italy appeared to be headed for the same fate, and Berlin was blockaded on the orders of Josef Stalin. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon, giving our new enemy the ability to bring catastrophic destruction to our homeland. And weeks later, communist forces won their revolution in China, and claimed the world's most populous nation for communism. And in the summer of 1950, seven North Korean divisions poured across the border into South Korea, marking the start of the first direct military clash of the Cold War. All of this took place in just the first five years following World War II."

It's hard now, in the first years of the 21st century to even imagine the succession of foreign policy disasters which appeared to engulf the US a few short years after its triumph over Nazi Germany and Japan's surrender in Tokyo Bay. The "fall of China"; the Soviet sweep across Eastern Europe punctuated by the annihilation of a US task force in Korea -- Task Force Smith -- were a succession of catastrophes orders of magnitude greater than any debacle facing GWB today. And they swept over Harry Truman's administration like an evil and apparently unstoppable tide. But Bush went on to describe how Harry Truman found in it not defeat but the framework of victory.

"Fortunately, we had a President named Harry Truman, who recognized the threat, took bold action to confront it, and laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War. President Truman set a clear doctrine. In a speech to Congress, he called for military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, and announced a new doctrine that would guide American policy throughout the Cold War. He told the Congress: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." With this new doctrine, and with the aid to back it up, Greece and Turkey were saved from communism, and the Soviet expansion into Southern Europe and the Middle East was stopped."

The implication, though it will be a hard act to follow, is that the time is ripe to create a new version of the doctrine which guided the Cold War and GWB says this bluntly. "Today, at the start of a new century, we are again engaged in a war unlike any our nation has fought before -- and like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory."

Haditha

Executing women and children? I don't believe it. Killed by accident, maybe. Killed by terrorists and blamed on the US, most likely. The values of the Marines, the values of Americans, the values of civilized nations, would not allow this to happen. Let's wait for the whole story to come out. As usual, we have one side of the story. And a sizable portion of this story seems to be from questionable sources.

"the doctor who certified the civilians as having been shot is, shall we say, not exactly objective. "

Here's a somber article about where the war could be going based on it's length and the media coverage. Basically, "stop the war because we have .01% bad troops." How about prosecute the bad troops, and stay to coarse to rid the world of terrorist intento in killing men, women and children because they don't follow a certain religion?

And on a similar note:

"As Peter Beinart noted... , the difference between the United States and most other countries isn't that we're perfect, but that we follow up stuff like this. That tends to get missed in the coverage."