Friedman's Facile Falsiness

Friedman's op ed in today's Times is full of holes, mistruths, and typical US/Israel one-sided analysis; I can find almost nothing with which I agree.

Israelis should be upset with their leaders--very upset. As should we be with our own leaders.

Israel, with the US goosing it along, instigated the war in Lebanon and so did more to hurt the cause of peace in the region than to help it.

Condi, rather than being congratulated for her "achievement" should be castigated for refusing to call a cease fire weeks before an agreement was finally reached, and she must share responsibility for the resulting slaughter of innocents on both sides.

When will these Neanderthals in government get it though their misshapen brains that war does not bring peace? It brings hatred and death.

Will our civilization ever evolve to a higher plane? So far, there is little evidence to support it.


Land for NATO
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Listening to the post-Lebanon-war debate in Israel leaves me wanting to say just one thing to Israelis: Get a grip on.

Israel is behaving like it lost the Lebanon war and now needs to tear itself apart, limb by limb, with investigations and new elections. Clearly the Israeli Army’s logistics broke down, and clearly it was ill-prepared for a guerrilla war against Hezbollah. And clearly it is a sign of the health of Israel’s democracy that Israelis feel free to castigate their leadership.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did a better job, under the circumstances, than he is being credited with, and, more important, the situation evolving in south Lebanon now has the potential to offer a whole new model for peacemaking.

Regarding Mr. Olmert, this war was not easy to manage, because it was about everything and nothing. There was absolutely no reason for the Hezbollah attack on July 12 across the U.N.-recognized Israel-Lebanon border, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two abducted. In that sense, the war was about nothing.

But precisely because it was about nothing, it was also about everything. If Hezbollah could just attack Israel — unprovoked — claiming among its goals the liberation of Jerusalem, and using missiles provided by an Iranian regime that says Israel should be wiped off the map, then it was a war about everything. And Israel had to respond resolutely.

So, gauging the right response was intrinsically hard. In the end, Mr. Olmert bombarded Hezbollah’s infrastructure, and, tragically but inevitably, the homes of Hezbollah’s Shiite followers, among whom Hezbollah fighters were embedded.

The Israeli response was brutal, but it did send a deterrent message, which Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, received. As he put it in an interview on Lebanon’s NTV, “If I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Even he doesn’t think he won.

Give Nasrallah credit for honesty. What Arab leader has ever been so self-critical? Nasrallah was reacting to those Lebanese voices that said: Thanks for passing out $12,000 to families who lost homes in the fighting, but had you spent that money on schools and jobs, rather than a stupid war, we’d all be better off.

The fact that Condi Rice and the French foreign minister, working with the U.N., were able to secure an international peacekeeping force in south Lebanon is a potentially key achievement on two fronts. If the force works — still a big if — Hezbollah will not be able to directly attack Israel without getting embroiled in a conflict with 15,000 French, Italian, Indian and possibly Turkish peacekeepers. That is a big new strategic problem for Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. They can’t hit Israel now without harming their ties with the E.U.

More important, what have we learned in recent years? One, Israel’s occupations of the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon are unsustainable. And two, Lebanon and the Palestinians don’t have their act together enough yet to control border areas when Israel leaves — either by agreement (Oslo) or by just unilaterally withdrawing and throwing the keys over the fence. As a result, the peace process has not been “land for peace,” but “land for war.”

When Israel pulls out of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and wants quiet, it needs a reliable structure of authority on the other side, which, right now, neither Lebanon nor the Palestinians alone can provide.

The U.N./European force evolving in Lebanon may offer a new model. It’s not “land for peace,” or “land for war,” but what I’d call “land for NATO.” Israel withdraws and the border is secured by a force that is U.N. on the outside but NATO on the inside.

“The fact that it has a heavy European/NATO component makes it credible to Israel, and the fact that it has a U.N. umbrella makes it acceptable to the Arab world,” said the U.N. under secretary Shashi Tharoor, the dynamic Indian diplomat who is a finalist to succeed Kofi Annan as secretary general and who deserves U.S. endorsement.

The Europeans have to understand “that something very big is at stake in this force,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. They have to prove that demilitarization in south Lebanon can give Israel security and Lebanon both sovereignty and an effective international partner to maintain order. If that happens, he added, “it could revive the chances for an eventual Palestinian-Israeli deal on the West Bank and Gaza.”

Yes, it’s a long shot, but maybe something good can actually come out of this good-for-nothing Lebanon war.

Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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