FDD

Did Israel violate the ceasefire? (AV)

Kofi Annan has blamed Israel for violating the ceasefire after it launched a raid against an arms shipment to the Bekka Valley. But Annan's position is not - nor can it be - supported by the actual ceasefire resolution, UNSCR 1701 (2006).

Structurally, UNSCR 1701 does two things: first, it forces an immediate and temporary ceasefire based upon the cessation of actual hostilities; second, it calls for an international presence in southern Lebanon to help Lebanon maintain the ceasefire. Right now, we are somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2. So a resort to force is justified if it derives sanction from the actual text of UNSCR 1701 or a right enshrined in the UN Charter or in international law generally. With this as the standard, there is a case to be made that Israel's commando raid against an arms shipment in the Bekaa Valley is lawful.

Israel is pointing out (correctly) that the resolution bans offensive military operations; this is a truism since a Security Council resolution cannot ban defensive operations. Israel is claiming its actions are justified by the right of self-defense, which is given partial expression in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The key requirement here is that Israel's response be necessary and proportional.

It is certainly proportional, since a commando raid that results in little collateral damage is proportional to the threat posed by an arms shipment to Hezbollah, and the proximate relationship between that shipment and an attack on Israel's territorial integrity. But was it necessary? This is a more difficult question, but there is a strong case to be made that the answer is yes.

Operative Clause 8 of UNSCR 1701 calls upon Israel and Lebanon " to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles." It then goes on to define these principles, the support of which is necessary, by the resolution's own language, for a permanent ceasefire: subclauses 2,3 and 5 list those that I think are most relevant: removing armed personnel, assets and weapons unless those authorized by the government of Lebanon from south of the Litani; the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon; no sale or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.

Before we reach Stage 2 of the ceasefire, the only parties capable of enforcing the terms of UNSCR 1701 are the governments of Israel and Lebanon, and nothing in the resolution precludes Israel from enforcing its terms, especially if this strengthens Israel's right of self defense. We should note that if the UN Security Council wanted Israel to remain uninvolved in the enforcement of the technical terms of the resolution, it could have done so. For example, when the Security Council authorized a coalition to use force against Iraq to remove it from Kuwait, the resolution was worded such that Israel could not be part of that coalition. Here, in the absence of such wording, Israel is fully justified in enforcing the resolution.

I eagerly await a press release from Kofi Annan criticizing the country that sent that shipment, which assuredly is in violation of UNSCR 1701. It is up to Israel and her allies to rebut the perfidious Kofi Annan when he tries to pin the blame for the collapse of his UN mission on Israel.

Reform Still Best Hope for Middle East

In today's World Politics Watch, FDD Senior Fellow Khairi Abaza argues that political reform remains the best long-term hope for reducing the supply of terrorist recruits and creating peace in the Middle East:

Despite virtual around-the-clock coverage of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, one important aspect remains poorly understood: the reaction of the 300 million strong "Arab Street." Turn on any Arab television channel, though, and you can't miss the rage and widespread support for Hezbollah and Hamas: streets roiling with protestors, callers to talk programs denouncing Israel and the United States, and clerics defending Hezbollah and calling for holy war.

Five years after 9/11, the West still struggles to understand this rage that pushes Arab masses to view radical groups as heroic forces of resistance. On one extreme, there are those who indict Islam or Arab culture as the culprit. On the other, there are those who blame it on Israeli aggression and U.S. bias towards Israel. Both are equally simplistic explanations of the contemporary Arab mindset, which is due in large part to the way Arab governments have deliberately nurtured this anger towards Israel, and increasingly the United States, for more than five decades.

The rest is here.

World Politics Watch is a new online daily focused on foreign policy and national security.  It features original commentary and reporting and a helpful roundup of international news from top sources.  Well worth bookmarking.

Ceasefire proposal - the devil's in the detail (AV)

Dore Gold, Israel's former Ambassador to the United Nations, makes a terrifyingly good point about the proposed ceasefire to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that has been embraced by France and the United States. As the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports,

"[T]he draft U.N. resolution sponsored by France and America calls on the establishment of a multinational force under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter, which deals with grave threats to international peace and security.

As such, the second resolution authorizing the peacekeepers could lead to sanctions or military strikes against Israel should Jerusalem take pre-emptive military action against a Hezbollah militia that the Israel Defense Force is unlikely to be able to disarm by the time the armistice kicks in."

The draft resolution calls for the "immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations." What will happen if the proposed ceasefire fails, the international force sent in is a paper tiger, and Hezbollah begins launching attacks against Israel?

Israel can - again - launch an attack against Hezbollah based on principles of self-defence, but Israel's antagonists will be able to say that Israel is explicitly violating the terms of a UN Security Council resolution. Nothing new there...

What will however be different is that, this time, the resolution will have been passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which means, in practice, an escalation of the charges against Israel.

Furthermore, since Kofi Annan will be charged with implementing the resolution, and will have an important say in determining whether it is being followed, this proposed resolution may turn out to be yet another cudgel the world uses to bash Israel. A cudgel, I might add, that offers no guarantee of increasing Israel's security.

 

Is international law standing in the way of a ceasefire? (AV)

Professor Eugene Kontorovich has a controversial op/ed in the New York Sun explaining why the latest proposals for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah violate international law. He writes:

The most surprising aspect of international proposals for a ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict is their endorsement of Hezbollah's demand that Israel give it territory, known as the Sheba Farms, in exchange for a end to rocket attacks on Israeli cities...What is certain — and yet entirely neglected in the discussion of the issue — is that the proposal violates bedrock norms of international law. Nations cannot enlarge their borders through the use of aggressive force. There are no exceptions to this non-acquisition principle.

Let's leave to one side the wisdom of ceding territory to a terrorist organization like Hezbollah and deal instead with Kontorovich's seductive claim that it violates international law.

It is certainly true that the UN Charter permits no exceptions to the non-acquisitive principle (this is the practical effect of Article 2(4) and Article 51 of the Charter). Still, Kontorovich is overstating his case with regard to international law generally - unless, that is, he is laboring under the mistaken view that international law is whatever the United Nations and Kofi Annan say it is. It isn't, mercifully.

The truth is, although there is a general presumption against the acquisition of territory as a result of aggression, this is a neoteric doctrine - emerging as it did in the 20th century. In the past, conquest was a legitimate way to acquire territory. Of course, during the 20th century we have understandably moved away from this extreme position, but there is no absolute rule of non-acquisition when aggression is involved.

For example, the rule of uti possidetis - the principle that territory vests to the victorious party - has essentially kept the fragile peace in many African conflicts after initial disputes over post-colonial border. The International Court of Justice recognized something approaching this in its deliberations on the land and maritime border dispute between Nigeria and Cameroon. Recently, this led to a truce and subsequently an agreement between these two countries. International law is better discerned from the way states act and their reasons for so acting rather than universalist-abstractions in the UN Charter.

In many ways, Kontorovich reveals the poverty of international law as a dispute resolution mechanism. Its boundaries are unclear, far too many people make authoritative statements when nuanced ones would be more appropriate, and by focusing too much on ex ante rules, it does not concern itself with creating lasting peace.

So, to answer the question posed in the title - International law isn't standing in the way of a ceasefire, the UN Charter is.

Youssef Ibrahim on Lebanon (CM)

We should view the events now unfolding not as a local battle for Lebanon but as a larger fight for the future of the entire Arab nation. For two decades, this nation of 350 million has been hijacked by a bizarre collection of Neanderthals, pseudo-revolutionaries, illiterate imams, and "Mad Max"-style Palestinian Arab terrorists of every hue, all united only in their desire to pillage in the name of a religion they expropriated.

Their manifest failure, which we hope will be delivered in resounding military terms, should come as a hard knock on the head of any Arab drifters. Cynics and cowards are already shouting "Enough!" but we know it will only be enough when the madman of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and all the other turbaned, bearded bats of the night are found, nailed down, and killed, and the whole Hezbollah movement in Lebanon — as well as Hamas and the other freelance Palestinian Arab factions — is convincingly discredited.

More here.

More notes & comments are in this week's e-newsletter.

Silent Majority? (CM)

Youssef Ibrahim (once my colleague at The New York Times) writing in the New York Sun:

Yes, world, there is a silent Arab majority that believes that seventh-century Islam is not fit for 21st-century challenges. That women do not have to look like walking black tents. That men do not have to wear beards and robes, act like lunatics, and run around blowing themselves up in order to enjoy 72 virgins in paradise. And that secular laws, not Islamic Sharia, should rule our day-to-day lives. We, the silent Arab majority, do not believe that writers should be killed or banned for expressing their views. Or that the rest of our creative elite - from moviemakers to playwrights, actors, painters, sculptors, and fashion models - should be vetted by Neanderthal Muslim imams who have never read a book in their dim, miserable lives.
   
The leader of Hizballah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, received a resounding "no" to pulling 350 million Arabs into a war with Israel at the Arab League's meeting of 22 foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday, and from pundits and ordinary people across the Arab world. All in all, it seems that when Israel decided to go to war against the priestly mafia of Hamas and Hizballah, it opened a whole new chapter in the Greater Middle East discourse. And Israel is finding, to its surprise, that a vast, not-so-silent majority of Arabs agrees that enough is enough.

More here.

Is Israel's response disproportionate? [AV]

The French government condemned Israel's response to the kidnapping of its soldiers as "a disproportionate act of war."

Disproportionate relative to what?

The French, in calling Israel's response disproportionate, are almost certainly measuring it against the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Bad as kidnapping Israeli soldiers is, the French reason, Israel's response is far more severe and, hence, disproportionate.

Except, this is the wrong standard. When speaking of proportionality, we shouldn't measure Israel's response against the initial wrong; instead, we should measure it against what it will take to stop that harm.

It is self-evidently true that if Israel were to kidnap three Hezbollah members - a par excellence proportionate response by French standards - this won't in any way reduce the threat it faces from Hezbollah.

This is why Israel is trying to disable the entire Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon, because only this, Israel calculates, will end the threat. This is also why Israel's response is proportionate - measured not just against the threat it faces but against what it will take to end that threat.

Middle East Media Round Up

CNN continues to update the situation in the Middle East here.  Reuters offers its own take on the situation here.

Charles Krauthammer tackles the question "Why They Fight" in today's Washington Post:

In 1948 Israel acquired life. The fighting raging now in 2006 -- between Israel and the "genocidal Islamism" (to quote the writer Yossi Klein Halevi) of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them -- is about whether that life should and will continue to exist.

Also in the Post, Michael Oren explains why Israel's only option in the current crisis is to confront state sponsors of terror:

By eliminating the terrorist leaderships in Gaza and southern Lebanon and deterring Syria and Iran from prodding their proxies to war, Israel can restore a reasonable level of security to its citizens.

The Bull Moose comments on the crisis here.

Littlegreenfootballs comments on the Vatican's condemnation of Israel here.

Michael Rubin argues that the U.S.' fight for spread of democracy is the Mideast is faltering in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Gulag of Saud

J. Peter Pham and Michael I. Krauss explore the relationship between the U.S. and the House of Saud, and Saudi Arabia's abysmal record on human rights in today's FrontPageMagazine.com:

This ally and friend [Saudi Arabia] has become the breeding ground for so many enemies of America (including, of course, the majority of the 9/11 mass murderers). Why are we throwing Texas barbeques for these people?

Is Iraq the new Philippines? [AV]

History hardly ever repeats itself, it only appears like it does to those unfamiliar with its particulars. Which is why Ross Douthat's comparison of the Iraq war to the occupation of the Philippines is incorrect. Ross writes, at the American Scene:

[S]o far the military conflict that the Iraq War most resembles isn't Vietnam or World War II, but the TR-boosted Spanish-American War - a quick and painless military victory over a second-rate power, driven by a mix of idealism, jingoism, and power politics, that segued into a long and grueling counter-insurgency campaign [in the Philippines].

What gave the Filipino insurgency its popular appeal is notably absent from the Iraqi insurgency. The Filipino insurgents had a degree of popular support based on its claim that Filipinos should govern the Philippines.

The Filipino insurgents had Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipinio native, to lead them. Which Iraqi is a leader in the jihadist insurgency? The Iraqi insurgents were led by, before he was killed, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. And now they are led by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian. The most hardcore and violent members of the insurgency are foreign jihadists, with no legitimate claim to pan-Iraqi nationalism.

Meanwhile, the United States armed forces are in Iraq today with the consent of the democratically elected government. Furthermore, the goal of the jihadists isn't a return to Iraqi rule, but a continuation of sectarian violence and terror that would extend beyond any U.S. troop withdrawal.

The differences, in this case, are more important than the superficial similarities in Ross' historical analogy. The Iraq war is many things--a replay of the occupation of the Philippines it most assuredly is not.