Israel has military might, so to quell the violence here's a stupid plan:

[ProSense]

add more military might!

Blair, Annan call for troops in Israel

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer 1 hour, 14 minutes ago

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - British Prime Minister
Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Monday for the deployment of international forces to stop Hezbollah from bombing Israel, an issue that has overshadowed the summit of world leaders.

President Bush, not realizing his remarks were being picked up by a microphone, bluntly expressed his frustration with the actions of Hezbollah, a militant Islamic group believed backed by Iran and Syria that is engaged in escalating warfare with Israel.

"See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over," Bush told Blair in a discussion before the Group of Eight leaders began their lunch.

Bush also suggested that Annan call Syrian President Bashar Assad to "make something happen."

more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060717/ap_on_re_eu/summit_rdp

The old inadvertent comment trick to make it seem like Bush has a plan. I take that back, it so stupid it must be coming from the Bush camp.

It cannot be resolved militarily...that is unless they just want to fight a war.

[C_U_L8R]

1. Strategery

The freepers are amazed at his brilliance.

Nuff said.

[Minnesota Libra]

2. What idiot boy and everyone else is not recognizing is...............

....that, whether we like it or not, the Middle East will periodically erupt in military skirmishes and, hopefully less often, in all out war. We will not be able to prevent all of it but if the world keeps an iron fist, through the UN, over the Middle East we will at least be able to contain most of it.

We could take Israel out of the Middle East tomorrow and those left in the Middle East would soon find another reason to fight each other.

on edit: I don't want anyone getting the idea that I support or agree in any way with idiot boy's comment/beliefs. I hate that creature and everything it stands for.

[karynnj]

3. This plan might be about the best that could happen - it is also NOT

dealing with it militarily. It might be the only way to avoid a continuing violent war.

It seems clear that Lebanon has said that it can not control Hezzbollah, whose stated objective is to attack Israel. Before they attacked, they had a very legitimate issue - no country could simply live with missles being shot over the border. This proposal will stop (or at least lessen the attacks on Israel. It is not the needed political solution, but it may be needed before we can get a political solution.

Some questions I have are whether Israel ever suggested, requested or demanded that the international community do this before and if they had demanded that Lebanon control the border or, if they couldn't, ask international help in doing so.

I do agree with your implicit concern that this would reward Israel for its attacks, but I can't see any other way that an all out war could be avoided. It may be that Israel should be asked to compensate Lebanon for some of the damage.

[ProSense]

5. Agree!

Posted this, then ran out to work. That's a good question: has Israel agreed to peacekeeping forces? Still, the implications of dispatching a peacekeeping force to Israel does carry with it the appearance that the U.S. is taking sides. Can this be address diplomatically without that? In any case, I really hope the emphasis is on diplomacy, what's best for both sides.

[karynnj]

6. I think it has to be an international peacekeeping force

It seems that Blair has asked for this. As all the leaders are (or were?) together, it's interesting that they didn't unite to ask for something - at any rate this is not only not US led but we're not on board.

I suspect that diplomacy alone can't work here. Lebanon has said that they can't control Hezbollah, which has members in the its legislature. If they can't handle it, that leaves few choices:
- Hezbollah controls itself (which they seem to do by attacking Israel)
- Israel controls that strip (They did this last century and it was a disaster for Lebanon and for Israel. In fact a twenty something Israeli interning at a NJ Jewish Center told a group of us when we were chatting after services in 2002 that occuping an Arab country would be as bad for the US as Lebanon was for them.)
- Lebanon could try to control it, possibly leading to their government falling and being replaced by a more radical government.

Hezbollah is a terrorist group and it does attack across the border - they are motivated by the awful situation that the Palestinians are in. That is not just Israel's fault - there are Arabs who prefer the problem to exist and support the worst elements. We didn't help when Bush insisted the Palestinians go ahead with elections when Israel (and Abbas) wanted them postponed.

A solution to the Palestinian problem is not going to come easily. It's not as simple as two states existing side by side. They are intertwined with each other. Palestinians had jobs in Israel that were lost due to the impossibility of crossing the border twice daily. In retrospect the decision to build settlements in the areas won in the 6 day war have created a nightmare.

[ProSense]

8. Yup, no U.S involvement. If not for Bush, there would be options.

In the longer run, however, it is the calls Bush didn't—or couldn't—make that might mean the difference in containing this new Mideast conflict. As part of his policy of isolating terror-supporting groups and nations, the Bush administration has no relationship with any of the other parties at war or the states behind them. That apparently means no dialogue, even through back channels, with Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Senior U.S. officials also said Bush and Rice had no intention of appointing a special envoy at this time. (Welch, having conducted all-day meetings with Israeli officials and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, took off on a previously scheduled trip to Libya over the weekend.) As a result, the president must watch and hope while his whole Mideast legacy—his goal of transforming a region that is the primary source for Islamist terrorism—stands at risk. Also on the line is his strategy of isolating Iran, as tensions mounted between Washington and Europe over Israel's action. "Usually in the past, whenever there was a crisis in the Mideast, the U.S. would immediately dispatch a high-level envoy," said Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to Washington, confirming that his government had received no U.S. contacts except a request for visas for Americans fleeing Lebanon to Damascus. "This time the only thing the United States is doing is blaming parties, assigning responsibility. There's nothing else."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13881743/site/newsweek

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > POLITICS

Bush Calls for Syria to Leave Lebanon

Thursday, March 03, 2005

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials are cautiously suggesting that the international community could provide peacekeepers in Lebanon (search) if they're needed to insure stability after a Syrian withdrawal, sources familiar with the debate said Wednesday.

The United States has taken the hard position that Syria (search) must withdraw its troops and security forces from Lebanon and permit the neighboring Arab nation to run its own political affairs for the first time in decades.

Snip...

Syria's ambassador warned that a quick withdrawal of his country's soldiers, could leave a power vacuum and rekindle the sectarian violence the Syrians surpressed.

U.S. officials don't trust Assad's promises and are anxious to see him comply with a longstanding U.N. resolution calling for Syria to withdraw from its neighbor's territory.

"We've seen words. What we want to see is action that moves in that direction. Syria needs to quit interfering in Lebanon. The Lebanese people are standing up, in the streets of Lebanon and saying we want to reclaim our sovereignty and independence, free from outside interference." said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. He added that not only must troops withdraw, the secret police must go as well and the nation must be permitted to run its own political affairs.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149173,00.html

The so-called “peace process” has been paralyzed for fifteen years by bitter Israeli arguments over whether the Palestinians should be allowed to have fifteen percent of former Palestine for their state, or ten percent, or none at all. Almost nobody in the Israeli debate was willing to let the Palestinians have everything they had controlled in 1967, because that would mean abandoning the Jewish settlements that had been planted all over the occupied territories.

Snip...

Since Shalit was taken prisoner, increasingly indiscriminate Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip have killed close to a hundred Palestinians. Arabs elsewhere watched in helpless rage, and eventually, last Wednesday, the Hezbollah guerrillas who drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon six years ago struck across Israel’s northern border, killing three Israeli soldiers and taking two others hostage.

Everyone knows that the Lebanese government does not control Hezbollah, but Israel held Beirut responsible, rolled its tanks across the border, and launched a wave of air strikes that has already killed over fifty Lebanese. That won’t free the hostages, and it poses the risk of a wider war that could involve not only Lebanon but Syria, but at least it protects Olmert from the accusation of being “weak,” always the kiss of death for an Israeli politician.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah are adept at pushing Israel’s buttons and getting it to overreact (even if that does involve Israel destroying what little infrastructure there was in the Gaza Strip, and destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure all over again). The dwarf superpower of the Middle East is good at smashing things up, and so long as the real superpower behind it does not intervene, nobody else can stop it. But nobody in this game has a coherent strategy for getting out of it.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=85406&d=16&m=7&y=2006

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero:

"Those who pushed for the war in Iraq told us that after the intervention a horizon of peace would open up," he told a meeting in Ibiza in the Balearic Islands.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060715/wl_mideast_afp/mideastunrest_060715185447

Madeline Albright:

"Iraq has diverted everybody's attention from really looking at a whole host of other issues," Albright said. "I think that it's very hard to say that has not made it worse. … It is absolutely clear that it has made it worse."
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/Mideast/story?id=2198337&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

All of this is to show that Bush, with no strategy, has been a destabilizing force in the entire region. He's all about regime change and demands, never presenting any workable solution. The one place country where U.S. withdrawal should be in full effect is Iraq (the country with the most potential to take care of it's internal struggles), but hBush will have none of that.


Bush's remark is interesting in that respect: Syria does have influence over Hezbollah.

[Igel]

4. What's needed is for Hezbollah to be disarmed.

Or for them to secede from Lebanon, so that they can legitimately declare war.

Lebanon could have called for international assistance to disarm Hezbollah and help it assert control over the territory. It did not. It didn't even stop Iran and Syria from arming the private militia controlling a quarter to a third of the country.

Hezbollah and Lebanon play this little co-dependent dance: Hezbollah agrees not to create massive death and destruction in the country and provide one kind of honor for the country, and Lebanon agrees that everything's hunky-dory as long as nothing important is attacked and provides legitimacy and a different kind of honor. The symbiosis might kill them.

[alvarezadams]

7. Sounds like...

you're talking about Likkud and Israel. Or the GOP/DLC-PNACers and the US.