The Russians have proposed that the UN Security Council pass a resolution demanding that there be a three-day truce in Lebanon, to allow humanitarian aid to be taken to Lebanese trapped in the south of the country. America’s UN ambassador, John Bolton, has described Moscow’s proposal as “unhelpful”. This begs the question: “Unhelpful” to whom?
Will it be unhelpful to the thousands of civilians who have not managed to flee the conflict, who, thanks to the destruction of highways and bridges by Israeli jets, are cut off in towns and villages whose infrastructure has been blasted, whose power supplies have been destroyed and basic services like water and sewerage curtailed? Will a three-day truce be unhelpful to these people whose supplies of food and bottled water are running short, whose hospitals have little or no medicine, whose emergency generators have no more fuel and whose lives for the last four weeks have been spent cowering in stuffy, overcrowded and fragile cellars in the knowledge that any minute a US-supplied bunker-buster precision-guided bomb could blast them all to pieces? Would a truce be unhelpful to stem the strong possibility of an outbreak of disease among these luckless Lebanese forced to survive in increasingly unsanitary conditions?
Or will it be unhelpful to the Israelis, still busy trying to break the back of Hezbollah, hunting down their fighters, regardless of the consequences of the civilians around them? The Israeli government has shed crocodile tears over the death and destruction among innocents but has laid the blame for these depravities squarely on Hezbollah, as if it were Hezbollah’s inaccurate ordinance rather then the high-tech, US-made weaponry launched from Israel that was raining down upon Lebanese territory.
Washington still champions the original draft resolution hammered out so slowly with the French. Yet the Americans must have known full well that because their draft rode roughshod over the interests and rights of the Lebanese government, there would be protest from the Arab world. No one in Washington characterized the intervention this week by the Arab League as “unhelpful”. And why should they? The representations from the League on behalf of the Lebanese meant that the resolution would need redrafting. Nothing in truth better suits the Americans than that any agreement of any sort be further delayed. They want their Israeli allies to have all the time that they need to carry on with their assault upon Hezbollah, regardless of the humanitarian impact upon the Lebanese population as a whole.
So that is why the mooted Russian resolution for a truce is “unhelpful”. Here is a clear proposal that for 72 hours would stop the carnage and allow help to be brought to the victims of this conflict. The fact is that in Washington’s eyes, all Lebanese are guilty of allowing Hezbollah to emerge as a power in their country and should be punished. Therefore it is “unhelpful” to stop the Israelis from punishing the entire Lebanese community, with bombs, starvation and disease.
