Israel Threatens Fragile Truce

Israel Threatens Truce With Hezbollah

Israel launches raid, invades Lebanese Airspace, and suggests they intend to resume war.
Israel is apparently trying to sabotage peace efforts.

Hear report from National Public Radio.

Summary

The United Nations has deemed that Saturday's raid by Israeli commandos in Lebanon is a violation of the cease-fire agreement. U.N. envoys traveled to Beirut where they warned that the fragile cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel could "easily start sliding … into the abyss of violence and bloodshed."


My take:

Israel is attempting to break the truce, so that it can resume its unfinished (and mostly failed) mission to knock out Hezbollah targets. Israels national ego has been damaged by previous failures in this war and now government leaders want another chance to strike at Hezbollah as a way to redeem themselves.

Israel is putting up obstacles for International Troops, setting conditions that they know can't be met. This is an effort to poison the peace efforts so that the UN deal will fail.
The lack of assertiveness & clear rules of engagement and direction by the UN has also led countries to refuse to send troops, which could also cause the ceasefire to fail. All of these questions should have been dealt with during negotiations.

France has since backed away from sending sufficient troops. Germany has refused. The UK will not send troops either. Without these leading European countries sending troops, it is unlikely that other nations will want to participate in any UN force. The UN contigent was supposed to be 15,000 troops. These troops were to be added to the 15,000 Lebanese troops to assist in keeping the two fighting parties apart and to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets into Northern Israel. However, the UN only has about 10% of the troops needed for its contingent of 15,000. It is unlikely that the mission will be carried through at all.

Then there is the problem of getting their soldiers back and disarming Hezbollah. No one seems to have the backbone or the stomach for the job....including the Labanese government. The Labanese government is essentially a hostage of Hezbollah. You basically have a terrorist group controlling an entire country.

Meanwhile, Israel is withdrawing, but continues to build up its forces in the region for something much bigger. I predict that the peace mission will be sabotaged (mostly by Israel) and the fighting will resume.

The next phase of this war could be much larger than the first. If war resumes (and all indications show that it will eventually resume because the UN is impotent in efforts to stop it), Israel will launch a full scale war on Lebanon. The purpose: to hold territory in order to protect Northern Israel, and to wipe out Hezbollahs weapons inventory. Syria could also be sucked into the conflict.

The UN is blowing what is probably its only chance to prevent this from taking place.

On Israels Failure

I predicted here several weeks ago that Israel would only make matters worse, cause a lot of death, and would not meet its objectives:
1. To cripple Hezbollah ...and

2. To get its soldiers back.

Israel failed in both missions. In fact, Hezbollah has come out stronger. They took a page out of the Bush administrations playbook, and they demonstrated that this kind of doctrine does not work against extremist groups.

One would think (and logic would suggest) that Israel would have learned something from this experience, and would be thinking of a different approach to solving its problems. Yet they only conjure up more ideas for war.

I cannot wrap my head around their strategy or thinking process. I can't make any sense out of their approach.

My predictions are often accurate...but this is one time that i'm actually hoping that my prediction is wrong.