‘We will have to fight them again’

21 March 2007

Edward Stourton has had unrivalled access to the protagonists in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here, on the eve of the Winograd Commission’s report, he reveals what really happened in this conflict that nobody won

His boss, Margaret Beckett, insists that she wanted the fighting to end as quickly as everyone else did and that she worked hard behind the scenes to achieve a ceasefire that would last. Calling for an immediate ceasefire would, she argues, have alienated the Israelis, and she rejects any suggestion that ‘we were resisting the calls to use the words “immediate ceasefire” in a way that meant we were happy for the conflict to continue’. There is no reason to doubt Mrs Beckett’s sincerity in this regard, but I have been given a rather different account of events by the man who was then America’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

Mr Bolton was famously acerbic and ‘undiplomatic’ as an ambassador; since being forced to give up his job in the aftermath of the American mid-term elections he has, as it were, loosened his tie still further. Conducting an interview with him can be an alarming experience, and he mixes candour and aggression in roughly equal measure. My exchange with him on this subject went as follows: