To cry uncle

C'est fini? Déjà? On peut laisser le mot de la fin à Billmon.

Kabuki Offensive

This is like a scene from a bar fight, where one of the pugilists first makes sure his friends have a good strong hold of him, and then starts yelling "Let me at him!"

Ehud Olmert's office said late Friday that the expanded incursion into Lebanon would continue "for the time being," despite agreeing to a cease-fire resolution drafted by the United Nations Security Council.

Senior Israel Defense Forces officers said that the IDF is "continuing forward at full power. . . "

This, of course, is 100% kosher bullshit -- nobody in their right mind would start a major offensive at "full power" knowing full well it will all have to be shut down within 48 or at most 72 hours. So it looks like the big push was just a big fraud all along -- a desperate attempt by Olmert and his bedraggled colleagues to try to kick a little dust in the eyes of their domestic constituents. But the message -- "Yeah, boy, if they had'na stopped me I would have kicked Hizbullah's ass but good -- isn't very original or at this point even slightly believable.

What else can they going to do? They've blown it, right down the line, from the opening bid for an aerial knockout, through the defeats and retreats, the incredible shrinking war aims, and the daily humiliation of seeing a third of Israel bombarded with rockets. And now this -- a ceasefire that appears to give Hizbullah all or nearly all of what it demanded (although not the Laker tickets), supervised by a "reinforced" version of UNIFIL (most of the reinforcements will probably never arrive) working under a limited one-year mandate, and with no more legal authority to use force than the current bunch of blue helmets.

(Update: There is some language in the resolution that appears to allow the use of deadly force, including to "protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence," which is a particularly unfunny joke considering what the sides have been doing to each other for the past month. It's a joke because despite its steadfast tone, the resolution was approved under Chapter 6, not Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. So it's not clear to me what the legal basis is for authorizing the use of force.

In any case, if anyone expects even a big, fat UNIFIL to be able to effectively police a ceasefire that one or both parties don't want to keep, they haven't been paying attention for the past 25 years.)

And for this, Lebanon was ravaged, thousands were killled, millions of civilians on both sides spent weeks couped up in air raid shelters, and the credibility and any lingering shreds of respectability the U.S. government had in the Islamic world were flushed straigh down the you-know-what.

All for this:

Why did we embark on the war, if not to ensure that French soldiers will protect Israel from the Hezbollah rocket battery.

The long knives are out -- for Olmert, for Peretz (the ward boss and ex-"peace" activist turned defense minister) for Halutz and the commander of the Northern Front (who was effectively sacked in the middle of the war) and for that matter probably half of entire IDF general staff -- if they don't sink daggers into each other's backs first. Losing is never pretty, and the post-war settling of accounts after this loss is going to be even less so.

Already it seems as if every minor league neocon in Washington is taking the opportunity to remind Israel that if there's one thing Americans detest it's a loser. So much for all that tearful singing of the Ha'tikvah. If Washington's Middle Eastern Rottweiler wants to keep getting its kennel ration, it's going to have to put a little more teeth into its work next time.

At this point I'm not sure if the Israeli branch of the punditburo has yet to recognize the full magnitude of the debacle, or whether it's just trying to put a brave face on it. But this statement, from Ha'aretz's Ze'ev Schiff, is a leading nominee for the Emperor Hirohito Memorial Prize for Ridiculous Understatement:

In regard to other Arab elements, it is very possible that Israeli deterrence will be somewhat undercut.

All the bellicose rhetoric in the world -- like Schiff's threat that Israel will respond with "cruel craziness" if other red lines are crossed in the future -- can't conceal the multiple failures: of a miltary aristocracy's arrogant faith in technology, of an Army that's grown accustomed to waging war against Palestinian teenagers, of a political establishment that believes with zombie-like intensity that the cure for its own incompetence is ever greater applications of military force. (Because, of course, that's the only thing the Arabs understand.)

There will be hell to pay for this fiasco -- coming as it did on top of Uncle Sam's own murder suicide pact in Iraq. When and where that payment wil be demanded isn't clear yet, but if the past is any guide it will be paid in the blood of the innocent, not the guilty. Condi better swap her forceps for a shovel, because it looks like there's going to be a plenty of graves to dig in the "new" Middle East.

Update 8/12 1:05 AM ET: Full text of the new resolution can be found here..

It contains the same asymetrical language as the first draft on the nature of the ceasefire -- that is, Hizbullah is told to halt "all attacks" while Israel is expected to stop all "offensive actions." Some have seen this as cover for a continued IDF onslaught, under the Israeli logic that all its actions are defensive. But I continue to see it as a meaningless distinction designed to avoid the appearance that Hizbullah and Israel are being placed on an equal footing.

Other than that, the only actual, tangible demand made upon Hizbullah is that it withdraw from the area south of the Litani River. Given that many, if not most of Hizbullah's fighters (and all of its supporters) in the area live there, it's hard to see what this is supposed to mean in the real world, other than instructions to Hizbullah men south of the Litani to store their weapons, take off their uniforms and stand by for further orders.

There's also some verbage about a weapons embargo and sealing the borders, but since the Lebanese Army is supposed to do the sealing (UNIFIL can also pitch in, but only at the Lebanese government's request) I think we can safely disregard it. Likewise the Security Council's demand that the Lebanese government move to implement its previous resolution to disarm Hizbullah. It would be one thing if the resolution called upon Hizbullah to disarm the Lebanese Army and the blue helmets. That I could believe. But the reverse is about as likely to happen as full implementation of the various Security Council resolutions dealing with the Palestinian refugees and the occupied territories.

In other words, your grandchildren will be dead first.

But Israel's Third Lebanon War will begin a lot sooner than that, I think.

Update 8/12 1:45 AM ET: It strikes me that Sheikh Nasrallah shouldn't have been quite so stingy about providing the Israelis with fig leaves. In light of how ineptly the Olmert government managed this war, it's probably in Hizbullah's interests to keep it in power.

Then again, Nasrallah may simply have calculated that Olmert is a lost cause, beyond salvaging.