Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Non-intervention would be nice...

As Condi's heart-aching sympathies for "innocent people" - gloriously backed up by tacit support for the Israeli action - ring out around the world, Simon Jenkins has been calling for non-intervention as the way forward. He has peddled the same line on Iraq, and it's certainly persuasive. Constant meddling in Middle East affairs seems to have averted little and perhaps prolonged the crisis.

I agree with Jenkins so far as any intervention will undoubtedly come with strings attached by the peacekeepers. The chances of this seem lessened by UN intervention, but the chances of Lebanon becoming a football for the West as they squabble over its fate - something which has crippled Afghanistan - seems an unenticing prospect.

However, the issue in Lebanon is not a stand alone issue. As I have argued before, so much of the world is tied up in the region that leaving Lebanon alone will be a massive advantage for Israel with its $2.3 billion p.a. of US military aid jangling in its pockets. Hizbullah, of course, receives aid from Syria and Iran but this is NOT the Lebanese state which is being so gouged and gutted by the current crisis as to make stable democracy myth if it were left on its own.

Iraq has diminished such hopes of a supervised transition to stability, but there is hope from Bosnia. As the UN High Representative with almost absolute power, Paddy Ashdown - although sometimes controversial - seemed to do just job and its good to see his successor, Christian Scwarz-Schilling, easing up on those powers. The strength of the scheme was that simple existence of a guarantor of the country's integrity, responsible to an organisation which is as close as you can get to neutral.

This of course rests on getting the right man for the job but it seems a far more sensible option than leaving the Middle East at the mercy of the US.

6 comments:

neil craig said...

I have beeen told by somebody who visited that the UN forces in Bosnia are signing up 100 year leases on their bases.

Bosnia & Hercegovina is not, never has been & never will be a nation. The west quite deliberately set up an openly genocidal Moslem Nazi to kill Serbs - this obviously does not lead to friendly feelings among Serbs. This was then made worse by the totally corrupt behaviour of the NATO paid "war crimes court" who recently released Nasir Oric the perpetrator of the real Srebrenica massacre (the genocide of 3,800 Serb civilians that only a totally corrupt lying racist organisation like the BBC could censor) while Fikret Abdic is serving 20 years for being "the only Moslem politician interested in peace" (Lord Owen).

This does not inspire confidence in the peace building capacities of our genocidal rulers.

MC Fanon said...

Post the Carnival, man. You committed.

Simon Hodges said...

Oh shit. Completely forgot. Haven't been blogging at all recently. I'll get onto it.

Devil's Kitchen said...

Plus, of course, the major ethnic groups in Bosnia got their own states. This has not been done in Iraq and, as such, the companrison is a spurious one.

DK

neil craig said...

Hasn't been done yet.
And the main problem with Bosnia is that they didn't get their own states only their own sub-administrations, which are thus not secured. This is the principle of shoving 3 cats in a sack & blaming them when they fight

MarxistFromLebanon said...

at least the US middle east turned out a different one

MFL

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