With friends like America, Lebanon doesn't need any more enemies

With friends like America, Lebanon doesn't need any more enemies
By The Daily Star

Friday, October 26, 2007

The Lebanese Army's engagement of intruding Israeli warplanes on Thursday demonstrates the hypocrisy at the core of US policy regarding the Middle East. The overflights, which are both generally illegal under international law and specifically prohibited under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, are highly provocative and inherently destabilizing - and yet beyond a few platitudes about "restraint," there has been no US effort to end them. At the same time, however, Washington has applied enormous pressure for the implementation of another part of 1701 - that regarding the disarming of Hizbullah - despite the difficulty and dubious benefit of doing so, the danger of upsetting delicate internal balances, and the patent inability of the Lebanese Army to replace the resistance as a deterrent.

President George W. Bush and other US leaders like to trumpet their determination to spread democracy, their sympathy with Lebanon, and their support of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government. But these and other pronouncements have translated into little or no concrete action. Whenever Lebanon's interests clash with those of Israel, the latter receives America's backing on multiple levels - even when its actions trample both the rights of other nations and the principle of collective security.
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The effect on Washington's credibility is predictable. When US officials assert that they want Lebanon's next president, for instance, to be someone who will "abide by international resolutions," they would stand a better chance of escaping ridicule if they had recently known such a president in their own country. Instead, successive US administrations have regarded the Security Council's decisions as a buffet from which they can pick and choose. Under Bush, who has also made selective enforcement of the law a pillar of his domestic policies, this tendency has become even more pronounced.

To understand the seriousness of the situation, one need only ask what might have happened if, by some freak occurrence, the Lebanese Army's crude anti-aircraft weapons had managed to down one of the Israeli Air Force's US-supplied multi-million-dollar toys. Would the Israelis have punished Lebanon's legitimate act of protecting its airspace by slaughtering a few hundred of its virtually defenseless soldiers? Or might they have decided to exact revenge by murdering some civilians instead? Does anyone imagine that Hizbullah would stand idly by in the face of such an outrage?