The Leader

Let Israel finish the job

Wednesday, 19th July 2006

To take an obvious and worrying example: the British government’s first objective — overriding all else at this stage — must be to evacuate every one of the 12,000 Britons and 10,000 dual Lebanese–British citizens in Lebanon who wish to leave the country. As Tony Blair was urging his fellow heads of government at the G8 to deploy a multinational force in the region, Britons were anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Royal Navy to take them to safety, and wondering, quite legitimately, why countries such as France and Italy seemed so much more efficient in proceeding with evacuation. Mr Blair finds the allure of the geopolitical centre-stage intoxicating. But his only priority now must be to get Britons out of Lebanon.

As for diplomacy, it has a role to play in this crisis, but only — again — if it is carried out as a means to a clear end, rather than as a fuzzy end in itself. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, has signalled that her visit to the region will not be a desperate exercise in shuttle diplomacy: there will be no repeat of Warren Christopher’s hectic trip to the Middle East ten years ago at Bill Clinton’s behest, no frantic shuttling between capital cities.

Dr Rice’s prime objective is not to secure a ceasefire at any cost, but to expedite the destruction of Hezbollah. So often this organisation is misrepresented in the West as a noble freedom-fighting force. In fact it is something quite different: a transnational terrorist army, funded, armed and harboured by Iran and Syria. As Douglas Davis explains on page 18, the group is being used quite systematically as a lethal messenger by Tehran, determined not to be thwarted in its mission to develop nuclear weapons.

At this stage, talk of prisoner exchanges is both premature and positively dangerous. Hezbollah’s cross-border kidnap of two Israeli soldiers on 12 July — only days after the abduction by Hamas of 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit — was an outrageous act of provocation. It deserves no reward.

It is no less misguided to imagine that the dispatch of an ‘international stabilisation force’ by the UN to southern Lebanon will resolve this crisis. The precedents for such a strategy are bleak. The existing 2,000-strong UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) has been little more than a helpless witness since its creation in 1978. After Israel’s 1982 invasion America led a four-nation force with France, Italy and Britain in Beirut — with the result that 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers were killed by truck bombs. Indeed it is far from clear what, precisely, a new multinational force would do in Lebanon at this point. Peacekeeping is only meaningful when there is a peace to be kept.