NO WAY TO END A WAR
By Mike Evans
For once Hizbullah and the government of Lebanon that it controls did the right thing yesterday: They shot down a draft cease-fire resolution in the UN Security Council that might have kept Israel from finishing off the murdering band of terrorists that has brought so much death and destruction to both Israel and Lebanon over the past month.
The resolution submitted by France and the United States was itself a compromise. The French want an immediate cease-fire before establishing a multi-national force to secure it. The US wants the multi-national force in place before a cease-fire is declared, so the cease-fire has a chance of lasting.
Hizbullah and Lebanon, on the other hand, oppose the French-US plan, because it ignores their demand that Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon before Hizbullah’s bombardments of northern Israel are halted.
At least for public consumption, Jerusalem welcomed the draft resolution, saying it would agree to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) remaining in southern Lebanon while the multi-national force is organized. Since Israel clearly wants to be allowed to win this war, UNIFIL may be the next best thing to no cease-fire at all, considering that UNIFIL observers watched Hizbullah take delivery of an estimated 16,000 Katyushas and other missiles over the past six years and did nothing to stop it. A real cease-fire would also mean preventing Hizbullah from rearming by smuggling arms from Syria or elsewhere.
On the up side, the resolution would allow Israel to retaliate if attacked and reiterates the necessity to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming Hizbullah, established by Iran in 1982 to threaten Israel by taking over southern Lebanon and becoming a state-within-a-state.
Hizbullah has turned every village in the South into an arsenal and a launching pad for missiles aimed at Israel. It cynically uses Lebanese civilians as human shields, firing missiles at Israel from inside villages – and even from inside homes. When these civilians are inevitably hurt by this heinous strategy, Hizbullah exploits the casualties it itself caused for propaganda purposes.
Before it was flattened by Israeli bombing, Hizbullah’s exclusive Dahiya quarter in southern Beirut was a gated community for jihadists dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and could only be entered by permission of Hizbullah. It was from there that some 200 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards supervised the deployment of Hizbullah’s terrorists, in effect Iran’s front-line troops in its war against the West.
It is wishful thinking to assume that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would agree to let his Hizbullah troops retire from warfare and go into politics, just as it is folly not to take seriously his threat to annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons. How can any UN resolution expect Israel to trust an Iranian terrorist proxy that has fired some 3,000 missiles packed with ball bearings to murder and maim as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible? It would be like asking the US not to go after Bin Laden, but instead negotiate with the terrorist masterminds of 9/11.
Dr. Michael D. Evans is the New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Iraq: The Next Move and The American Prophecies. His latest book, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, will be released by Thomas Nelson in mid-September.
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