U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER
The New York Times
July 22, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that she would head to Israel on Sunday at the beginning of a round of Middle Eastern diplomacy. The original plan was to include a stop to Cairo in her travels, but she did not announce any stops in Arab capitals.

Instead, the meeting of Arab and European envoys planned for Cairo will take place in Italy, Western diplomats said. While Arab governments initially criticized Hezbollah for starting the fight with Israel in Lebanon, discontent is rising in Arab countries over the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, and the governments have become wary of playing host to Ms. Rice until a cease-fire package is put together.

To hold the meetings in an Arab capital before a diplomatic solution is reached, said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, “would have identified the Arabs as the primary partner of the United States in this project at a time where Hezbollah is accusing the Arab leaders of providing cover for the continuation of Israel’s military operation.”

The decision to stay away from Arab countries for now is a markedly different strategy from the shuttle diplomacy that previous administrations used to mediate in the Middle East. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Ms. Rice said Friday. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

Before Ms. Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, she will join President Bush at the White House for discussions on the Middle East crisis with two Saudi envoys, Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the secretary general of the National Security Council.

The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration’s decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. The officials included employees of two government agencies, and one described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel.

One American official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an “emergency resupply” of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when an American military airlift helped Israel recover from early Arab victories.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said: “We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel’s defense acquisitions.”

Israel’s need for precision munitions is driven in part by its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and satellite-guided bombs.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs intended to destroy concrete bunkers. The package also provides for selling satellite-guided munitions.

An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy the “bunker buster” weapons described the GBU-28 as “a special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground.” The document added, “The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28’s on their F-15 aircraft.”

American officials said that once a weapons purchase is approved, it is up to the buyer nation to set up a timetable. But one American official said normal procedures usually do not include rushing deliveries within days of a request. That was done because Israel is a close ally in the midst of hostilities, the official said.

Although Israel had some precision guided bombs in its stockpile when the campaign in Lebanon began, the Israelis may not have taken delivery of all the weapons they were entitled to under the 2005 sale.

Israel said its air force had dropped 23 tons of explosives Wednesday night alone in Beirut, in an effort to penetrate what was believed to be a bunker used by senior Hezbollah officials.

A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah’s military strength by roughly half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks or longer. “We will stay heavily with the air campaign,” he said. “There’s no time limit. We will end when we achieve our goals.”

The Bush administration announced Thursday a military equipment sale to Saudi Arabia, worth more than $6 billion, a move that may in part have been aimed at deflecting inevitable Arab government anger at the decision to supply Israel with munitions in the event that effort became public.

On Friday, Bush administration officials laid out their plans for the diplomatic strategy that Ms. Rice will pursue. In Rome, the United States will try to hammer out a diplomatic package that will offer Lebanon incentives under the condition that a United Nations resolution, which calls for the disarming of Hezbollah, is implemented.

Diplomats will also try to figure out the details around an eventual international peacekeeping force, and which countries will contribute to it. Germany and Russia have both indicated that they would be willing to contribute forces; Ms. Rice said the United States was unlikely to.

Implicit in the eventual diplomatic package is a cease-fire. But a senior American official said it remained unclear whether, under such a plan, Hezbollah would be asked to retreat from southern Lebanon and commit to a cease-fire, or whether American diplomats might depend on Israel’s continued bombardment to make Hezbollah’s acquiescence irrelevant.

Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, said that Israel would not rule out an international force to police the borders of Lebanon and Syria and to patrol southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has had a stronghold. But he said that Israel was first determined to take out Hezbollah’s command and control centers and weapons stockpiles.

Website of the Day

From Israel to Lebanon

Bush Far From Neutral Player in Mideast

by Helen Thomas
Hearst Newspapers
July 21, 2006

President Bush has abdicated the United States' role as an honest broker in the Middle East crisis exploding on two fronts, Lebanon and Palestine.

In failing to call for a U.N-sponsored cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, Bush has lost his credentials as a neutral player.

In the Arab world, he is viewed as a cheerleader for the Israeli side, not a cheerleader for peace.

A newcomer to the problems of the Middle East, Bush told reporters Tuesday that the root cause of Middle East strife was Hezbollah.

Anyone with knowledge of the region knows most of the problems stem from the nearly 60-year-old Palestinian issue.

While the Arab-Israeli problem has festered, the president has been absorbed with the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Bush has gone along with the Israelis in isolating the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, which Israel deprives of its tax revenues.

Furthermore, the Bush administration raised no objection when Israel seized and arrested more than two dozen elected Hamas officials in retaliation for a Palestinian guerrilla attack on an Israeli army base and the kidnapping of two soldiers.

Israel also destroyed the only energy plant in Gaza, leaving thousands of Palestinians without electricity.

Against that background, the current issue is more than two Israeli soldiers getting kidnapped by Hezbollah.

In past Middle East conflicts, the president of the United States has always called for a truce as a first step to end hostilities and start peace talks. And past presidents often have dispatched dispassionate mediators to the area.

But Bush has distinguished himself with a tepid call for "restraint," although he is contemplating sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as an emissary.

The U.S. has been standing by during the bombardment of Lebanon's infrastructure -- commercial airport and ports and highways.

During last weekend's siege of Lebanon, a tearful Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora begged Bush to call for a cease-fire, but to no avail.

No presidential predecessor would have turned down such an appeal. It's no surprise that the terms proposed by the United States to end the current hostilities are the same terms as Israel's.

Meantime, both sides are taking a severe civilian toll.

For Lebanon it's been déjà vu all over again, reminiscent of the Israeli invasion in 1982.

On the other front, Bush has made a mockery of the U.S. stated intention of spreading democracy in the Middle East. There was a free and democratic election in Palestine and Hamas won, a fact of life that has greatly pained the Bush administration.

It was a victory the U.S. and Israel refused to acknowledge on grounds that the Palestinians did not recognize Israel's right to exist.

It's a two-way street. Israel should recognize the Palestinians' right to exist within their pre-1967 war borders. Then we will see a final peace settlement.

Meantime, Israel is unilaterally defining its borders. It has also built a wall, much on Palestinian land, and expanded its settlements on the West Bank. The Palestinians continue to be subjected to daily humiliations under Israeli occupation.

The Bush administration likes to brag that it has in its hip pocket the authoritarian leaders of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia who also want to rein in the militant Hezbollah.

By failing to intervene and play its traditional role of peacemaker, however, the U.S. has lost the great esteem it once commanded with all the people in the Middle East.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail to: helent@hearstdc.com.

Lebanese Mass Grave

Coffins of Lebanese victims are laid in a mass grave in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, Friday, July 21, 2006. With a few mourners at hand, 72 victims of Israel's 10-day-old bombardment are buried in a mass grave in this southern Lebanese city. Lebanese have streamed out of the south, leaving some villages ghost towns, but with roads destroyed many are trapped in their homes. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch
July 21, 2006

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

No, this is not 'our war'

Pat Buchanan
The American Conservative
July 20, 2006

My country has been "torn to shreds," said Fouad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, as the death toll among his people passed 300 civilian dead, 1,000 wounded, with half a million homeless.

Israel must pay for the "barbaric destruction," said Siniora.

To the contrary, says columnist Lawrence Kudlow, "Israel is doing the Lord's work."

On American TV, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the ruination of Lebanon is Hezbollah's doing. But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon?

No, Israel is doing this, with the blessing and without a peep of protest from President Bush. And we wonder why they hate us.

"Today, we are all Israelis!" brayed Ken Mehlman of the Republican National Committee to a gathering of Christians United for Israel.

One wonders if these Christians care about what is happening to our Christian brethren in Lebanon and Gaza, who have had all power cut off by Israeli airstrikes, an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left them with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July.

When summer power outrages occur in America, it means a rising rate of death among our sick and elderly, and women and infants. One can only imagine what a hell it must be today in Gaza City and Beirut.

But all this carnage and destruction has only piqued the blood lust of the hairy-chested warriors at the Weekly Standard. In a signed editorial, "It's Our War," William Kristol calls for America to play her rightful role in this war by "countering this act of aggression by Iran with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

"Why wait?" Well, one reason is that the United States has not been attacked. A second is a small thing called the Constitution. Where does George W. Bush get the authority to launch a war on Iran? When did Congress declare war or authorize a war on Iran?

Answer: It never did. But these neoconservatives care no more about the Constitution than they cared about the truth when they lied into war in Iraq.

"Why wait?" How about thinking of the fate of those 25,000 Americans in Lebanon if we launch an unprovoked war on Iran. How many would wind up dead or hostages of Hezbollah if Iran gave the order to retaliate for the slaughter of their citizens by U.S. bombs? What would happen to the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, if Shiites and Iranian "volunteers" joined forces to exact revenge on our soldiers?

What about America? Richard Armitage, who did four tours in Nam and knows a bit about war, says that, in its ability to attack Western targets, al-Qaida is the B Team, Hezbollah the A Team. If Bush bombs Iran, what prevents Hezbollah from launching retaliatory attacks inside the United States?

None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.

But none of them has attacked our country, nor has Syria, whom Bush I made an ally in the Gulf War and to whom the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, Ehud Barak, offered 99 percent of the Golan Heights. If Nixon, Bush I and Clinton could deal with Hafez al-Assad, a tougher customer than son Bashar, what is the matter with George W. Bush?

The last superpower is impotent in this war because we have allowed Israel to dictate to whom we may and may not talk. Thus, Bush winds up cussing in frustration in St. Petersburg that somebody should tell the Syrians to stop it. Why not pick up the phone, Mr. President?

What is Kristol's moral and legal ground for a war on Iran? It is the "Iranian act of aggression" against Israel and that Iran is on the road to nuclear weapons – and we can't have that.

But there is no evidence Iran has any tighter control over Hezbollah than we have over Israel, whose response to the capture of two soldiers had all the spontaneity of the Schlieffen Plan. And, again, Hezbollah attacked Israel, not us. And there is no solid proof Iran is in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has signed, but Israel refuses to sign.

If Iran's nuclear program justifies war, why cannot the neocons make that case in the constitutional way, instead of prodding Bush to launch a Pearl Harbor attack? Do they fear they have no credibility left after pushing Bush into this bloody quagmire in Iraq that has cost almost 2,600 dead and 18,000 wounded Americans?

No, Kenny boy, we are not "all Israelis." Some of us still think of ourselves as Americans, first, last and always

And, no, Mr. Kristol, this is not "our war." It's your war.

To Save a Revolution

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, July 21, 2006; A17

You could sense the hurt and anger as Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora pleaded this week to the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in Beirut for a halt to Israeli attacks on Lebanese targets. "The country has been torn to shreds," he said. "I hope you will not let us down."

The challenge for the Bush administration as the Lebanon war explodes into its second week is just that -- to keep faith with Siniora and his Cedar Revolution, even as it stands by its close ally Israel. This isn't simply a question of appearances and public diplomacy. Unless Siniora's government can be strengthened, there is little hope for achieving the U.S. and Israeli goal of bringing Hezbollah's guerrillas under lasting control.

"America's role is to energize a political outcome that helps to satisfy Israeli military objectives by other means," says one administration official. The problem is that the American diplomatic timetable is so slow that by the time a cease-fire is reached -- more than a week off, by U.S. estimates -- Lebanon may be too broken to be put back together anytime soon.

Administration officials rightly insist that returning to the status quo in Lebanon would be a mistake. After last year's triumph of forcing a withdrawal of Syrian troops, Siniora's government was struggling (and largely failing) to establish a viable nation. This nation-building effort was hamstrung by Hezbollah's insistence that it maintain what amounted to a state within a state.

The administration's strategy is to let Israel do the dirty work of breaking Hezbollah and then move in a foreign "stabilization force" to bolster the Lebanese army. Once Israel has pushed the guerrillas north, this international force would help the Lebanese army deploy to the southern border with Israel and the eastern border with Syria. The plan is for a beefed-up successor to the existing United Nations force in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL.

The administration's informal deadline for getting a U.N. mandate for this new international force is July 31, when UNIFIL's current mandate expires. The French now command that force, and the United States hopes they can remain in that role, with new troops coming from such robust military powers as Italy, Turkey and Canada.

Siniora has privately warned the Bush administration that by bombing so many targets in Lebanon, Israel is undermining its own strategic goals. Lebanese are angry with Hezbollah for starting the war by kidnapping Israeli soldiers, and most want to see the militia under government control. But Siniora has asked why the Israelis are hitting Lebanese airports, ports, roads, villages and other targets that primarily affect civilians. And he has criticized attacks on the Lebanese army, which even the Israelis say is the key to long-run stability and security.

Some Bush administration officials share Siniora's concern about the scope of Israeli attacks. These officials are said not to understand Israeli targeting decisions. The administration is understood to have communicated this concern to Jerusalem.

The Lebanon crisis has put the administration in a double bind. U.S. officials know they need to move soon toward a cease-fire to preserve any chance for the Siniora government to regain control of the country. But they don't want to move so quickly that they prevent Israel from completing its primary military mission of destroying Hezbollah's arsenal of missiles and pushing the Shiite guerrillas back from the border. The administration's two-track approach is perhaps summed up in Augustus Caesar's famous admonition: "Make haste slowly."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will head for the Middle East this weekend to try to animate this diplomacy. She has no plans to stop in Syria, and that's a sensible decision. It's up to the Syrians to demonstrate that they can play a positive role -- not least to their Sunni Arab neighbors, who are angry about President Bashar al-Assad's alliance with Shiite Iran and its proxies. A recent claim by Syrian intelligence officials that they have no control over Hamas leader Khaled Meshal is said to have infuriated Egypt's intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who responded indignantly: "Don't give us that! We are not Mauritania! We are Egypt!"

Supporting Israel and Lebanon at the same time is a tricky task -- especially at a moment when the bombs are flying between one nation and the other. Unless the administration moves quickly to demonstrate that it supports the Siniora government, and not just Israel, its larger strategy for defusing the conflict may begin to unravel. Administration officials recognize that a stable Lebanon cannot be achieved by military action alone. But for now, all the world sees is Hezbollah rockets and Israeli bombs.

In Mideast Strife, Bush Sees a Step To Peace

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post
Friday, July 21, 2006; A01

President Bush's unwillingness to pressure Israel to halt its military campaign in Lebanon is rooted in a view of the Middle East conflict that is sharply different from that of his predecessors.

When hostilities have broken out in the past, the usual U.S. response has been an immediate and public bout of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire, in the hopes of ensuring that the crisis would not escalate. This week, however, even in the face of growing international demands, the White House has studiously avoided any hint of impatience with Israel. While making it plain it wants civilian casualties limited, the administration is also content to see the Israelis inflict the maximum damage possible on Hezbollah.

As the president's position is described by White House officials, Bush associates and outside Middle East experts, Bush believes that the status quo -- the presence in a sovereign country of a militant group with missiles capable of hitting a U.S. ally -- is unacceptable.

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.

"He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians," said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. "The tacticians would say: 'Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.' The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.' "

Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, said Bush's statements reflect an unambiguous view of the situation. "He doesn't seem to allow his vision to be clouded in any way," said Rosen, a Democrat who has come to admire Bush's Middle East policy. "It follows suit. Israel is in the right. Hezbollah is in the wrong. Terrorists have to be eliminated, and he sees Israel fighting the war he would fight against terrorism."

Many Mideast experts warn that there is a dangerous consequence to this worldview. They believe that Israel, and the United States by extension, is risking serious trouble if it continues with the punishing air strikes that are producing mounting casualties. The history of the Middle East is replete with examples of the limits of military power, they say, noting how the Israeli campaign in Lebanon in the early 1980s helped create the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah.

They warned that the military campaign is turning mainstream Lebanese public opinion against Israel rather than against Hezbollah, which instigated the violence. The attacks also make it more difficult for the Lebanese government to regain normalcy. And what seems now to be a political winner for the president -- the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution yesterday backing Israel's position -- could become a liability if the fighting expands to Syria or if the United States adds Lebanon to Iraq and Afghanistan as a country to which U.S. troops are deployed.

"There needs to be a signal that the Bush administration is prepared to do something," said Larry Garber, the executive director the New Israel Fund, which pushes for civil rights and justice in Israel. "Taking a complete hands-off, casual-observer position undermines our credibility. . . . There is a danger that we will be seen as simply doing Israel's bidding."

Robert Malley, who handled Middle East issues on the National Security Council staff for President Bill Clinton, voiced skepticism about whether the current course would pay off for either Israel or the United States. "It may not succeed with all the time in the world, and Hezbollah could emerge with its dignity intact and much of its political and military arsenal still available," said Malley, who monitors the region for the International Crisis Group. "What will you have gained?"

Those who know Bush say his view of the conflict was shaped by several formative experiences -- in particular the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which made fighting terrorism the central mission of his presidency. Another formative experience was a helicopter ride over the West Bank with Ariel Sharon in 1998, when Bush was Texas governor -- a ride he later said showed him Israel's vulnerability. The cause of Israel has been championed by many of the evangelical Christians who make up a significant chunk of the president's political base.

Bush and his team were also deeply skeptical of the Middle East policy of the previous administration, and of what they see as an excessive devotion to a peace process in which one of the protagonists, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was not seriously invested. Explaining the reluctance to push quickly for a cease-fire, one senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record indicated a belief that premature diplomacy might leave Hezbollah in a position of strength.

"We don't want the kind of truce that will lead to another conflict," said this official, who added that, when the time comes, "you will see plenty of diplomacy."

Fred S. Zeidman, a Texas venture capitalist who is active in Jewish affairs and has been close to the president for years, said the current crisis shows the depth of the president's support for Israel. "He will not bow to international pressure to pressure Israel," Zeidman said. "I have never seen a man more committed to Israel."

Let Israel Take Off the Gloves

The true sources of terrorism need to be confronted; Syria would be a good start.
Max Boot
Los Angeles Times
July 19, 2006

A LOT HAS BEEN written in recent years about stateless terrorism. The events of the last few weeks show, to the contrary, that some of the world's most malignant terrorist groups continue to rely on state support. Hamas runs its own quasi-state — the Palestinian Authority. Hezbollah is a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. And lurking behind both are the real troublemakers: Iran and Syria.

The current crisis exposes the inadequacy of American policy toward this new axis of evil. The problem is not, as so many have it, that President Bush's "cowboy diplomacy" has unsettled the region's vaunted stability. It is that Bush hasn't been enough of a cowboy.

Working with France, the U.S. succeeded last year in forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon, thus allowing free elections to be held. But Lebanese democracy will remain hollow until Hezbollah disarms in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, something that no one has been willing to enforce — until now.

The U.S. should have done more to stop Syria from supporting not only the terrorists targeting Israel but those targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. Syrian strongman Bashar Assad appeared to be down for the count when a U.N. investigation found evidence linking his regime to the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But Bush let him get up off the mat. Senior U.S. officials keep proclaiming that Syria's support for terrorism is unacceptable, but by not doing more to stop it, they have tacitly accepted it.

The same is true of Iran. The mullahs continue to develop nuclear weapons and smuggle explosives into Iraq, and our only response has been talk and more talk. Perhaps this is a prelude to eventual military action, but in the meantime the administration should have done more to aid internal foes of the mullahocracy. It has taken until now — five years into the Bush presidency — for the U.S. to commit any serious money ($66 million) for Iranian democracy promotion, and the State Department has blocked efforts on Capitol Hill to spend even more.

The Jewish state is now paying the price for American inaction. The Katyusha, Kassam and Fajr rockets raining down on Israel are either made by Iran or with Iranian assistance. The same is true of the C-802 cruise missile that hit an Israeli warship. Syria facilitates the delivery of these weapons and provides a haven for Hamas political head Khaled Meshaal. The Iranians and Syrians are as culpable for the aggression against Israel as if they had been pulling the triggers themselves — which, for all we know, they may have been.

And world leaders such as Vladimir V. Putin (he of the scorched-earth policy in Chechnya) have the chutzpah to criticize Israel for its "disproportionate" response? What would a proportionate Israeli response to the snatching of its soldiers and the bombardment of its soil look like? Should Israel kidnap low-level Hamas and Hezbollah operatives? Those organizations wouldn't mind in the slightest; they want as many martyrs as possible.

The real problem is that Israel's response has been all too proportional. So far it has only gone after Hamas and Hezbollah. (Some collateral damage is inevitable because these groups hide among civilians.) Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is showing superhuman restraint by not, at the very least, "accidentally" bombing the Syrian and Iranian embassies in Beirut, which serve as Hezbollah liaison offices.

It's hard to know what accounts for this Israeli restraint, for which, of course, it gets no thanks. It may just be a matter of time before the gloves come off. Or Olmert may be afraid of upsetting the regional status quo. The American neocon agenda of regime change is not one that finds favor with most Israelis (ironic, considering how often the rest of the world has denounced neocons as Mossad agents). The Israeli attitude toward neighboring dictators is "better the devil you know." That may make sense with Jordan and Egypt, which have made peace with Israel, but not with Syria, which serves as a vital conduit between Tehran and Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iran may be too far away for much Israeli retaliation beyond a single strike on its nuclear weapons complex. (Now wouldn't be a bad time.) But Syria is weak and next door. To secure its borders, Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard. If it does, it will be doing Washington's dirty work. Our best response is exactly what Bush has done so far — reject premature calls for a cease-fire and let Israel finish the job.

Attacks Qualify as War Crimes, Officials Say

By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
July 20, 2006

UNITED NATIONS, July 19 — The United Nations’ top human rights official said Wednesday that the killing and maiming of civilians under attack in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza and the West Bank could constitute war crimes.

“The scale of killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control,” said Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights.

Ms. Arbour is a former justice of Canada’s Supreme Court who, as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, indicted the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

“International humanitarian law is clear on the supreme obligations to protect civilians during hostilities,’’ she said. That same obligation exists, she added, in international criminal law, which defines war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians,” she said in a statement released by her Geneva office. “Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged innocent civilians is unjustifiable.”

The Swiss-based International Red Cross, the recognized guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, said Wednesday that Israel had violated the principle of proportionality provided for in the Conventions and their protocols.

It also noted that Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel. “Hezbollah fighters too are bound by the rules of international humanitarian law, and they must not target civilian areas,” it said.

At the United Nations, there was support for the view that the only way to spare more victims was to halt the fighting, but there was also evidence that the United States would continue to dispute it.

“We think a truce is needed for humanitarian reasons,” said Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the ambassador of France, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council.

But John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, said the notion that a cease-fire would solve the problem was “simplistic.” “Among other things,” he said, “I want somebody to address the problem how you get a cease-fire with a terrorist organization.”

“This is a different kind of situation,” he added, “and I’m not sure that sort of old thinking, conventional thinking, works in a case like this.”

Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general, said that “on humanitarian grounds but also to enable ultimately a sustainable solution to this, one which allows Israel and its neighbors to live in peace with each other, continued conflict does not help.”

Secretary General Kofi Annan was returning to New York from Europe and was scheduled to brief the Council on Thursday on his call for a “cessation of hostilities” and a stabilization force for southern Lebanon.

“The need to bring this to a stop while we find a longer-term political and security solution is one that he will be stressing tomorrow in the Council,” Mr. Malloch Brown said.

Lebanon

Brothers Nabil Alaa al-Din, left, Ramzi, center, and Ali, right, wounded in an Israeli warplane missile attack in the southern village of Srifa, Lebanon, sit at hospital beds in the outskirts of the port city of Sidon, Wednesday, July 19, 2006.

The airstrikes flattened 15 houses and the village's headman, Hussein Kamaledine, said 25 to 30 people lived in the houses, but it was not known if they were at home at the time. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

The Crackdown in Cairo

President Bush stands by while the democratic movement he helped to inspire is crushed.
The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 19, 2006; A18

WITH THE TACIT consent of the Bush administration, authoritarian Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is continuing his campaign against the democratic movement that sprouted in his country last year. His latest target is the fledgling independent press, which in recent months has dared to publish stories about rampant official corruption, criticize Mr. Mubarak's promotion of his son's political career and promote the liberal democratic reforms that President Bush once advocated for Egypt. Last week Mr. Mubarak's ruling party reaffirmed a law that makes it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to "affront the president of the republic" -- or insult parliament, public agencies, the armed forces, the judiciary or "the general public interest."

This violates a promise Mr. Mubarak made two years ago to end the jailing of journalists -- and it is more than a mere threat. On June 26 a court sentenced the editor of one of the new independent newspapers and a reporter to prison for the "crime" of having reported on a lawsuit that accused Mr. Mubarak, plausibly, of "wasting the government's resources," "squandering foreign aid" and turning "Egypt into a monarchy." (The plaintiff is also in jail.) A few weeks earlier two Egyptian bloggers covering an opposition demonstration were arrested, jailed for several weeks and brutally treated; at least one was raped in a police station.

The crackdown on the press was predictable, because it followed Mr. Mubarak's assault on opposition political parties and on a judges' reform movement -- the two other key elements of Cairo's promising Spring of 2005. In May the secular liberal candidate who ran against Mr. Mubarak for president, Ayman Nour, lost his final appeal against a five-year sentence on trumped-up charges. Hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won 20 percent of parliamentary seats in last year's elections, were arrested that month. In June the president forced through a new law on the judiciary that squashed the judges' demands for independence. That followed the prosecution of several leading jurists who had dared to denounce fraud in the elections.

The only hopeful news is that Egypt's new democratic forces are bravely resisting Mr. Mubarak's crackdown. More than two dozen newspapers suspended publication for a week this month to protest the press law; the judges are threatening their own strike. Opposition bloggers continue to work, despite the regime's assaults on them; anyone who doubts the reports of brutality can view videos, posted on the Internet, of police beating female protesters. On Sunday a prominent former member of Mr. Mubarak's party, Osama Ghazali Harb, announced the formation of a new liberal democratic political party, with the goal of fighting for the reforms that Mr. Mubarak once promised.

Those promises were made at a time when Mr. Bush was publicly pressing Egypt to "lead the way" in Arab democratization. Now, in Cairo and around the Middle East, the common view is that Mr. Bush has abandoned that policy. Each step of Mr. Mubarak's crackdown prompts a tepid demur from the State Department -- which last week meekly asked Egyptian officials "to take a look at any law that they might be considering . . . in the context of the importance of freedom of the press." High-level Egyptian-U.S. contacts have been stepped up and the administration has strongly urged Congress not to subtract a single dollar from Egypt's $2 billion in annual aid.

Egypt's democrats feel betrayed by the United States -- and rightly so. In its opening manifesto, Mr. Harb's new Democratic Front denounced the "hypocrisy of those who preach the right way but stray away from it with their actions." The words apply to George W. Bush as well as to Hosni Mubarak.

Lebanon: The Only Exit Strategy

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 19, 2006; A19

There is crisis and there is opportunity. Amid the general wringing of hands over the seemingly endless and escalating Israel-Hezbollah fighting, everyone asks: Where will it end?

The answer, blindingly clear, begins with understanding that this crisis represents a rare, perhaps irreproducible, opportunity.

Every important party in the region and in the world, except the radical Islamists in Tehran and their clients in Damascus, wants Hezbollah disarmed and removed from south Lebanon so that it is no longer able to destabilize the peace of both Lebanon and the broader Middle East.

Which parties? Start with the great powers. In September 2004 they passed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, demanding that Hezbollah disarm and allow the Lebanese army to take back control of south Lebanon.

The resolution enjoyed the sponsorship of the United States and, yes, France. As the former mandatory power in Lebanon, France was important in helping the Lebanese expel Syria during last year's Cedar Revolution, but it understands that Lebanon's independence and security are forfeit so long as Hezbollah -- a lawless, terrorist, private militia answering to Syria and Iran -- occupies south Lebanon as a rogue mini-state.

Then there are the Arabs, beginning with the Lebanese who want Hezbollah out. The majority of Lebanese -- Christian, Druze, Sunni Muslim and secular -- bitterly resent their country's being hijacked by Hezbollah and turned into a war zone. And in the name of what Lebanese interest? Israel evacuated every square inch of Lebanon six years ago.

The other Arabs have spoken, too. In a stunning development, the 22-member Arab League criticized Hezbollah for provoking the current crisis. It is unprecedented for the Arab League to criticize any Arab party while it is actively engaged in hostilities with Israel. But the Arab states know that Hezbollah, a Shiite militia in the service of Persian Iran, is a threat not just to Lebanon but to them as well. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have openly criticized Hezbollah for starting a war on what is essentially Iran's timetable (to distract attention from Iran's pending referral to the Security Council for sanctions over its nuclear program). They are far more worried about Iran and its proxies than about Israel. They are therefore eager to see Hezbollah disarmed and defanged.

Fine. Everyone agrees it must be done. But who to do it? No one. The Lebanese are too weak. The Europeans don't invade anyone. After its bitter experience of 20 years ago, the United States has a Lebanon allergy. And Israel could not act out of the blue because it would immediately have been branded the aggressor and forced to retreat.

Hence the golden, unprecedented opportunity. Hezbollah makes a fatal mistake. It crosses the U.N.-delineated international frontier to attack Israel, kill soldiers and take hostages. This aggression is so naked that even Russia joins in the Group of Eight summit communique blaming Hezbollah for the violence and calling for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south.

But only one country has the capacity to do the job. That is Israel, now recognized by the world as forced into this fight by Hezbollah's aggression.

The road to a solution is therefore clear: Israel liberates south Lebanon and gives it back to the Lebanese.

It starts by preparing the ground with air power, just as the Persian Gulf War began with a 40-day air campaign. But if all that happens is the air campaign, the result will be failure. Hezbollah will remain in place, Israel will remain under the gun, Lebanon will remain divided and unfree. And this war will start again at a time of Hezbollah and Iran's choosing.

Just as in Kuwait in 1991, what must follow the air campaign is a land invasion to clear the ground and expel the occupier. Israel must retake south Lebanon and expel Hezbollah. It would then declare the obvious: that it has no claim to Lebanese territory and is prepared to withdraw and hand south Lebanon over to the Lebanese army (augmented perhaps by an international force), thus finally bringing about what the world has demanded -- implementation of Resolution 1559 and restoration of south Lebanon to Lebanese sovereignty.

Only two questions remain: Israel's will and America's wisdom. Does Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have the courage to do what is so obviously necessary? And will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's upcoming peace trip to the Middle East force a premature cease-fire that spares her the humiliation of coming home empty-handed but prevents precisely the kind of decisive military outcome that would secure the interests of Israel, Lebanon, the moderate Arabs and the West?

Hezbollah's little helpers

The Washington Times
Published July 18, 2006

As Israel fights to break the back of one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has come up with a very bad idea. He wants to throw a lifeline to Hezbollah, dispatching U.N. peacekeepers to Lebanon. Perhaps Mr. Annan and other advocates of such a force can tell us how many peacekeepers would be necessary, whether Hezbollah would be required to disarm, and, if so, who would disarm them.
Mr. Annan must explain how his peacekeepers would differ from the current U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which has failed miserably ever since it was dispatched in 1978. UNIFIL was created following the Coastal Road Massacre of March 11, 1978 -- when Palestinian terrorists based in Lebanon and affiliated with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization entered Israel along the Mediterranean coast and hijacked a bus. Thirty-six hostages died. In response, the Israel Defense Force invaded southern Lebanon to destroy terrorist bases there. The U.N. Security Council responded by adopting Resolution 425, calling on Israel to "immediately" withdraw from Lebanon and establishing UNIFIL for the purpose of "assisting the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority to the area."
In June 1982, UNIFIL failed to stop Palestinian terrorist groups from attacking Israel and forced an occupation of much of Lebanon, leading to the destruction of the Palestinian terrorist bases there. With substantial Syrian and Iranian complicity, Hezbollah supplanted the PLO as the dominant terrorist organization in Lebanon. In 1985, Israel withdrew from Lebanese territory but for a small security zone on Lebanon's southern border, required to prevent attacks on Israel. Over the next 15 years, UNIFIL was mostly worthless, unable to stop Hezbollah attacks but remarkably successful in getting in the way of Israelis defending themselves. Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, describes how this worked: "Hezbollah would launch military attacks 50 meters from a UNIFIL outpost, Israel would shoot back and UNIFIL would protest against the Israeli response."
When Israel withdrew from the security zone in May 2000, UNIFIL was worthless again, as Hezbollah rushed to the border to establish a terrorist presence the U.N. forces could only observe. On Oct. 7, 2000, Hezbollah operatives used cars disguised as U.N. vehicles to kidnap and kill three Israeli soldiers. When Israel asked UNIFIL for a videotape of the cars that Hezbollah used in the kidnapping, U.N. officials lied, telling them that no such tape existed. UNIFIL failed to prevent last week's Hezbollah raid, in which two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and eight others died. That set off the current mess.
Once Hezbollah is defeated, disarmed and forced to return the soldiers kidnapped last week, someone may find a useful role for the United Nations to play in helping the Lebanese Army extend its authority to the south. For now, however, the Israeli military is doing more to enhance the long-term prospects for peace in Lebanon than the United Nations has ever done. Kofi Annan can perform a great service by staying out of the way.

Diplomacy’s Turn in Lebanon

Editorial
The New York Times
Published: July 18, 2006

International diplomacy finally started to stir yesterday in response to the havoc on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border, including calls by the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for dispatching an international peacekeeping force. Stopping the fighting won’t be easy, but the dangers of escalation are too great to permit the major powers, or worried Arab rulers, to turn away.

The only beneficiaries of a wider war would be Iran, Syria and the armed Islamic radical groups that they support throughout the region. The challenge for everyone else is to find a formula to achieve peacefully what just about every country apart from Syria and Iran now seems to agree has to happen. Hezbollah should disarm its private militia, stop operating as a state within a state in southern Lebanon and allow the Lebanese government in Beirut to exercise the full sovereignty it has been denied for decades.

As it happens, the United Nations Security Council went on record calling for just that to happen nearly two years ago. Unfortunately, the members of the Council never did anything to turn those particular provisions into reality. Instead, Security Council members, including the United States, hoped that Hezbollah’s participation in parliamentary politics would speed its transformation into a normal political party and eventually lead to the desired result.

Hezbollah’s raid into Israel this month, in which it killed three Israeli soldiers and took two more hostage, put an abrupt stop to such wishful thinking. Now it’s up to the Security Council to finish the job it left unfinished two years ago.

That can be achieved only by a unified Security Council, led by the two countries that have long taken the lead on Lebanese issues — France and the United States. At this point, such unity appears elusive, with the Bush administration arguing that Hezbollah should act first, returning the kidnapped Israeli soldiers and halting its rocket attacks before any cease-fire, while others seem to envision a simultaneous halting of hostilities by both sides.

Those differences need to be worked out over the next few days, so that the killing and human suffering can stop as soon as possible. Washington is right to press for the release of the Israeli soldiers held hostage. But this should not be a precondition for the earliest possible cease-fire. Many lives and the stability of the wider region depend on achieving a quick halt to the fighting.

Back From the Brink

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; A19

The question in Israel's war with Hezbollah is not whether the Israeli government had a right to retaliate. It is whether there is a way of avoiding full-scale war in the Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded to Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli soldiers because Israel has been trying to do what the world has told the Jewish state it had to do: live within internationally recognized borders and pull Israeli troops out from lands it came to occupy as a result of past military victories.

Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, put the matter as well as anyone: "Israel is currently waging the most just war in its history," he wrote Monday. "Not a war of occupation, but rather a war of defense. Not a settlements war, but rather a Green Line war. A war over the validity of an international border that was drawn, defined and recognized by the United Nations."

As it happens, Shavit is also critical of the Israeli government's handling of this war and suggests a unilateral 72-hour cease-fire to give the "international community" a chance to resolve the "problem of the northern border by nonviolent means." In the meantime, Israel could plan "thoroughly and meticulously" to defeat Hezbollah if everyone else's efforts failed.

I found myself sympathetic to Shavit's proposal in part because it might give the normally ineffectual players outside the region a chance to think through the disaster that is in the making.

For anyone who spent time in Lebanon in the mid-1980s, this struggle is a particularly toxic case of deja vu -- even if Olmert is trying to learn lessons from Ariel Sharon's failed effort to reorder Lebanese politics by way of Israel's 1982 invasion.

The law of unintended consequences seems to be an iron law in the Middle East. The most depressing view of 1982 and today now goes like this: The 1982 Israeli invasion did indeed destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization infrastructure in Lebanon -- initially to the satisfaction of many Lebanese Shiites tired of living under the PLO's thumb. Israel hoped that the Shiites, long forced to the bottom of the Lebanese class and religious heap, might be their allies in a new Lebanon.

But many unfortunate things happened on the road to that new Lebanon. One of them was the replacement of an older Shiite protest politics, rooted in secular leftist ideologies, with a new politics that grew steadily more religious and then more fundamentalist. Hezbollah became the dominant voice of this tendency. Under Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader since 1992, the movement has used Iranian help and Syrian cooperation to become the most powerful voice of Shiite discontent.

And so, having rid Lebanon of the PLO, the Israelis now find themselves roughly a quarter-century later confronting a movement that is, if anything, more extreme and intransigent, powered by Tehran's deep pockets and its palpable interest, shared with the Syrians, in causing trouble. Talk about unintended consequences.

If there is any good news here, it is that parts of the Arab world -- particularly Sunni governments alarmed by Iran's use of Shiism in its reach for hegemony -- have criticized Hezbollah's provocations. But what will those reproofs mean on the ground? Olmert himself took a step toward a solution yesterday by telling the Israeli Knesset that the fighting could stop if two kidnapped Israeli soldiers were released and the Lebanese army took control of the country's southern border.

The most frightening aspect of this war is that the logic for escalation is far stronger than the logic for de-escalation. If Hezbollah's power is not severely degraded, Israel will remain vulnerable. But if Olmert wants to avoid Sharon's 1982 mistake of a large-scale occupation of Lebanon, what options does he have?

As long as Hezbollah continues to receive support from its Iranian patrons and its Syrian partners, it will be able to re-create itself, building on long-standing Shiite grievances. Absent such support, the movement would wither militarily. That argues for settling things once and for all with Iran and Syria -- which means wholesale war in the Middle East at a time when roughly 130,000 American troops are in Iraq.

This would be a calamity, which is why alarmism is the highest form of realism in this case. The "international community" cannot engage in its usual dithering. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair called yesterday for an international force to disarm Hezbollah, it seemed an impossibly impractical demand. But if there's something more practical than avoiding a full-scale regional war, I don't know what it is. And in this case, it will take a genuine international effort, not a narrow "coalition of the willing."

So let there be at least a brief cease-fire to let the world take account of the catastrophe on its doorstep.

A War With Extremists

This Middle East conflict should end with the defeat of its instigators.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; A18

SOMEWHAT remarkably, the world leaders gathered in St. Petersburg managed to grasp the most important point about the current Middle East crisis: It "results from efforts by extremist forces to destabilize the region and to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people for democracy and peace." In other words, the current warfare in Lebanon, Gaza and Israel stems not from Israel's occupation of Arab lands or its holding of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, but from a blatant bid by Iran and Syria and their allies in Hamas and Hezbollah to stop the creation of a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and the parallel consolidation of a democracy in Lebanon.

It follows that the only satisfactory outcome to the conflict would be a decisive defeat for those extremist forces. Should Hamas and Hezbollah fail militarily, Arab democrats and those who favor the creation of a peaceful Palestine alongside Israel would see the removal of their largest obstacle, while the pernicious influence of Iran and Syria in the region would be curtailed.

The worst result would be that suggested yesterday by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki following consultations with his allies in Damascus: "a cease-fire followed by a prisoner swap." Such an outcome would legitimize the terrorist operations by Hamas and Hezbollah that began the conflict and further empower their rogue military organizations at the expense of the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority. It would restore Syrian influence in Lebanon and grant Tehran the ability to ignite a new Middle East conflagration at its convenience.

The extremists now favor a cease-fire because they know that the longer the fighting continues, the more damage Israel is likely to do to the military infrastructure and leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. Anyone who believes the Israeli army can't be effective in this kind of war hasn't followed the events of the past several years, during which its devastating assassination campaign against Hamas induced that group to declare a unilateral cease-fire in early 2005. Since Hamas broke that truce last month, Israel has killed or captured several score of its leaders; the rest cannot appear in public without inviting an airstrike.

The centrist government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert risks overplaying its hand if it continues to attack Lebanese civilian infrastructure or if the death toll of civilians, which now stands above 200, continues to rise. If it limits its aim to Hezbollah and Hamas and their weapons, it will be quietly cheered by many Lebanese and Palestinians, as well as by moderate Arabs around the Middle East.

The middle course between allowing Israel to take the fight to Hamas and Hezbollah and pressuring it to accept Tehran's terms is that suggested by Britain and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan: an international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. It's worth noting that such a force already exists -- and has failed miserably in its nearly three decades of existence. Success would require Western troops and a very different mandate: in particular, authority to prevent launchings of missiles and raids against Israel from Lebanon, and to enforce Security Council Resolution 1559, which ordered the disarmament of Hezbollah. An international diplomatic initiative that allows Hezbollah to preserve and eventually restock its military wing would be worse than none at all.

Is U.S. Winning? Army Chief Is at a Loss

By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times
July 15, 2006

WASHINGTON — It seemed like a routine question, one that military leaders involved in prosecuting the war in Iraq must ask themselves with some regularity: Is the U.S. winning?

But for Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff known for his straight-shooting bluntness, it proved a hard one to answer.

During a Capitol Hill briefing for an audience mostly of congressional aides, Schoomaker paused for more than 10 seconds after he was asked the question — lips pursed and brow furrowed — before venturing:

"I think I would answer that by telling you I don't think we're losing."

It was a small but telling window into the thinking of the Army's top uniformed officer and one of the military's most important commanders: Despite the progress being made by the new Iraqi government and the continuing improvement of local security forces, the outcome in Iraq, in many ways, is growing more uncertain by the day.

"The challenge … is becoming more complex, and it's going to continue to be," Schoomaker mused. "That's why I'll tell you I think we're closer to the beginning than we are to the end of all this."

Schoomaker's candor is not unusual for a man who, by his own admission, was lured out of retirement to take the Army's top job reluctantly. He has repeatedly told audiences that he was content in his Wyoming retirement when he got the call from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to return to active service.

It is a candor that appears to be contagious. The Army's top commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., acknowledged this week that the recent increase in sectarian violence in Baghdad might mean the U.S. has to increase the number of soldiers in the Iraqi capital — rather than the long-awaited decrease for which commanders had hoped.

For his part, Schoomaker was quick to note that his uncertainty did not mean that he was pessimistic. He noted that the creation of the new Iraqi government was an important achievement, although he cautioned that convincing Iraqis to use nonviolent, political means instead of guns and bombs to achieve their ends would be a "tough shift."

"I think we are making significant progress; I think the challenges continue to come," he concluded. "I do not believe that we are losing, but where I think we are on the scale of winning is very difficult, and time's going to tell."

Israel, the US and the New Orientalism

A Repackaged Rationale for Dual Control of the Middle East
By M. SHAHID ALAM
CounterPunch
July 17, 2006

The West has never had an easy time coming to terms with Islam or Islamicate societies. There was a long period, lasting more than a millennium, when the two were seen as existential threats. In order to mobilize the energy to contain and then roll back these threats--first from the 'Holy Lands' and Southwestern Europe and later from Southeastern Europe--European writers presented Islam as a Christian heresy, a devil-worshipping religion, Mahomet's trickery, a militant and militarist cult crafted for Bedouin conquests. To this list of dark qualities the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment added a few more. Now Islamicate societies were also seen as despotic, fatalistic, fanatical, irrational, uncurious, opposed to science, and inimical to progress. When Europe gained the upper hand militarily in the nineteenth century, this complex of Orientalist ideas would be used to justify the conquest and colonization of Islamic lands.

Starting in the nineteenth century, a small minority of European thinkers began to reject the standard Orientalist constructs of Islam and Islamicate societies. They began to look at Islam and Islamicate societies as they were described in Muslim sources; they wrote of Islamic achievements in philosophy, the sciences, arts and architecture; they emphasized Islam's egalitarian spirit, the absence of racial prejudice, and their greater tolerance of other religious communities. Many of these Europeans who had chosen to give Islam its due were Jews who had only recently escaped from the ghettoes to enter into Europe's academies. In part, these Jews were appropriating for themselves the achievements of another Semitic people. In calling attention to the tolerance of Islamic societies, they were also gently reminding the Europeans that they had far to go towards creating a bourgeois civilization based on humane values. Less charitably, one might say that the Jewish dissenters were undermining the Christian West by elevating its opposite, the Islamic East.

A second shift in the temper of Orientalism that began in the 1950s would become more pervasive. From now on, a growing number of mainstream scholars of Islam and Islamic societies would try to escape the essentializing mental habits of earlier Orientalists. This shift was the work of at least three forces. The most powerful of these forces was the struggle of the colonized peoples in the post-War period to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism. In the context of the Cold War, the political and economic interests of Western powers now demanded greater sensitivity to the culture, religion and history of the peoples they had denigrated over the previous four centuries. A show of respect for their subjects had now become a virtue in the writings of Orientalists.

The Orientalists were also being put on notice by the entry into Western academia of scholars of Middle Eastern and South Asian origins--including Phillip K. Hitti, Albert Hourani, George Makdisi, Muhsin Mahdi, Syed Hussein Nasr and Fazlur Rahman--who brought greater empathy and understanding to their studies on Islamicate societies. Edward Said too was a member of this group; his distinctive contribution consisted of his erudite and sustained critique of the methods of Orientalism. Said's critique belongs also to a broader intellectual movement--fueled in part by scholars from the non-Western world--that not only debunked the distortions of Orientalists but also sought to remedy their errors by writing a more sympathetic history of Asian and African societies. In other words, during this period some sections of the West began to acknowledge with some consternation the racism and bigotry that permeated much of the social sciences and humanities.

Starting in the 1950s, Islam also attracted the attention of several spiritual explorers from the West who were led hither by their disappointment with the poverty of living spiritual traditions in their own societies. The deep understanding of Islam they acquired through association with authentic Sufis--Muslims who cultivated, in addition to their meticulous observance of the Shariah, the inner dimensions of Islam--allowed them to write several outstanding books on the metaphysical and spiritual perspectives of Islam, both as they are practiced by its living exponents and as they are reflected in the calligraphy, architecture and the still surviving traditional crafts of the Islamic world. The writings of Rene Guenon, Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Charles Le Gai Eaton, among others, demonstrate conclusively that Islam offers an original spiritual perspective that is fully capable of supporting a deeply religious life.

Yet, running counter to these developments, a new Orientalism was also taking shape in the post-War era. It was not based on any strikingly new thesis about Islam. Instead, it was mostly a repackaging of the old Orientalism designed to renew a more intrusive dual US-Israeli control over the Middle East. Led by Bernard Lewis, the new Orientalists claim that the Islamicate world is a failed civilization. Among other things, they argue that Islamicate societies have failed to modernize because Islam's mixing of religion and politics makes it incompatible with democracy; Islam does not support equal rights for women and minorities; and Islam commands Muslims to wage war until the whole world is brought under the sway of Islamic law. In short, because of its intransigence and failure to adapt to the challenges of modernity, Islam has become the greatest present threat to civilization, that is, to Western interests.

What makes this repackaged Orientalism new are its intentions, its proponents, and the enemy it has targeted for destruction. Its intention is to mobilize the United States behind a scheme to balkanize the Middle East into ethnic, sectarian and religious micro states, a new system of client states that would facilitate Israel's long-term hegemony over the region. Ironically, the scholars who have dominated this repackaging of the old Orientalism are mostly Jewish, a reversal of roles that flows directly from the creation of a Jewish colonial-settler state in the heart of the Middle East. Once they had succeeded in creating Israel, the Zionists knew that its long-term survival depended on fomenting wars between the West and Islam. Zionism has pursued this goal by its own wars against Arabs and, since 1967, a brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; but equally, it has pulled out all the stops to convince the United States to support unconditionally Israel's depredations against Arabs.

The target of the war that the new Orientalists want to wage are what they variously call Islamists, Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, Islamo-fascists, or Islamic terrorists. Whatever the term, it embraces all Islamicate movements--no matter what their positions on the political uses of violence--that appeal to Islamic symbols to mobilize local, national, and pan-Islamic resistance against the wars that the United States and Israel have jointly waged against the Middle East since 1945. These Islamicate resistance movements, which are both national and transcend national boundaries, have replaced the secular nationalists who, after failing to achieve their objectives, were co-opted by the United States and Israel to destroy the Islamicate resistance.

The events that have unfolded over the past few decades--the rise of the Islamicate resistance, the strategic cooperation between the United States and Israel, the new Orientalism, and the war that is now being waged against the Islamicate world--could have been foreseen, and indeed were foreseen, when the British first made a commitment to create a Jewish state in Palestine. An American writer on international affairs, Herbert Adams Gibbons, showed more acuity on the long-term fallout of Britain's Zionist plans than the leading Western statesmen of the times. In January 1919, he wrote: "If the peace conference decides to restore the Jews to Palestine, immigration into and development of the country can be assured only by the presence of a considerable army for an indefinite period. Not only the half million Moslems living in Palestine, but the millions in surrounding countries, will have to be cowed into submission by the constant show and occasional use of force (italics added)."[1] Even more prophetically, Anstruther MacKay, military governor of part of Palestine during World War I, wrote that the Zionist project would "arouse fierce Moslem hostility and fanaticism against the Western powers that permitted it. The effect of this hostility would be felt through the Middle East, and would cause trouble in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. To this might be ascribed by future historians the outbreak of a great war between the white and the brown races, a war into which America would without doubt be drawn (italics added)." [2] We are now living in the future predicted by Gibbons and MacKay. The Islamicate resistance has been slow in developing but now its has spread in one form or another beyond Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and India to the farthest corners of the Islamic world--and even into the Islamic diaspora in the West.

The challenge of scholarship is to define, locate, contextualize and debunk the New Orientalism. We constantly need to remind the world, especially the Western world, so mesmerized by the images flashing on the TV screens, that there is a long history of Western depredations--wars, colonization, slavery, exterminations, expropriations, treachery and hypocrisy--behind the images that disturb their hopes of peace founded on grave injustices.

History is the ally of tormented peoples; they can tell it as it was. It is the tormentors who deny their history; they have to make it up to deny the torments they have inflicted. They must speak constantly, unremittingly of the need to put down insurgencies, terrorist attacks, threats to world peace, and violence against the civilized order. We too must constantly revisit the history of Western depredations over the past four centuries to connect the world's present miseries to this infamous history. Only a deepening consciousness of this history, constantly renewed, carries hope that the powers that use stealth to manufacture terror can be stopped.

M. Shahid Alam teaches economics at a university in Boston. He is author of Is There An Islamic Problem (The Other Press: 2004). He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

References:

1.Herbert Adams Gibbons, "Zionism and the world peace," in: Richard P. Stevens, ed., Zionism and Palestine before the Mandate: A phase of Western imperialism (Beirut: The Institute of Palestine Studies, 1972): 63, reprinted from: Century 97, 3 (January 1919).

2.Richard P. Stevens, ed., Zionism and Palestine before the Mandate: 47-48, reprinted from: Anstruther MacKay, "Zionist aspirations in Palestine," Atlantic 216 (July 1920): 123-25.

Give Israel time to complete the mission

The Washington Times
July 17, 2006

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's necessary decisions to launch military campaigns against Hezbollah and Hamas have created an opportunity to change the balance of forces between Israel and the terror networks that have plagued the Middle East since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The most important thing that Israel needs -- particularly in Lebanon, where Hezbollah had been permitted to stockpile upwards of 10,000-12,000 rockets and missiles to target Israel -- is time: time to root out the weapons caches stockpiled in private homes; time to hit the rocket and missile-launching sites and terrorist training camps Hezbollah has established throughout Lebanon; and time to hunt down the jihadists in the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere whose life's work is to destroy the Jewish state. As missiles continue to rain down on northern Israel (and the Israeli government warns residents of Tel Aviv, its largest city, located nearly 70 miles from the Lebanon border, that Hezbollah may have missiles that can reach them), it is apparent that Israel will need significantly more time to degrade Hezbollah's ability to wage war.
In Lebanon and Gaza, Israel has at least five key goals in addition to freeing the soldiers kidnapped by terrorists: 1) forcing Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza to prevent terrorists from operating out of their territory; 2) crippling the military capabilities of Hezbollah and Hamas; 3) re-establishing the credibility of the Israel Defense Force's (IDF) deterrence against terrorist groups; 4) deterring state sponsors of terror like Iran and Syria; and 5) reminding the international community of the indispensable roles that Tehran and Damascus have played in forcing Israel into several wars that may soon envelop other parts of the Middle East. All of these strike us as legitimate goals that are broadly consistent with U.S. foreign policy interests and merit Washington's support.
President Bush has made clear that he is sympathetic with Israel's plight and understands that Israel is acting in self-defense. The most important thing Washington can do in the coming days will be to fend off the efforts of powerful countries, like Russia and China and many in the European Union, who will attempt to mobilize pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Lebanon before it cuts Hezbollah down to size. And Washington should support Jerusalem's demand for the unconditional return of the three IDF soldiers kidnapped from Israeli soil in the past 22 days -- without yielding to Hezbollah and Hamas demands that Israel free imprisoned terrorists in exchange.
The worst possible outcome of all would be an empty, feel-good ceasefire agreement that leaves a large chunk of Hezbollah's Lebanese terrorist infrastructure in place and fails to address the root cause of the current problem in Lebanon: the failure of the Lebanese government and the international community to create a binding, enforceable mechanism for compelling Beirut and Hezbollah to meet the requirements of U. N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which requires every militia operating in Lebanon to disarm (all except for Hezbollah did so years ago).
The Israeli government wants (and many Lebanese quietly agree) the Lebanese Army to extend its authority to the border with Israel. Israel expected this to happen when it unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The problem until now has been that everyone has shied away from doing this because that would have meant forcing a confrontation with Hezbollah. Israel hopes that if it is successful in cutting Hezbollah down to size, it can end the stranglehold that Hezbollah (and, by extension, Iran and Syria) have had on Lebanon for a generation. It is no exaggeration to say that, if Hezbollah is severely weakened, the biggest long-term beneficiaries will be the great majority of Lebanese -- Muslim and Christian alike -- who have seen their nation dragged into a war with Israel which they want no part of in order to serve the malevolent purposes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Indeed, there is some evidence that, in the wake of the devastation in Lebanon triggered by Hezbollah's actions over the past five days, people who are not generally known as Israeli sympathizers are growing weary of Hezbollah's thuggery. Ordinary Lebanese are bitterly complaining that Hezbollah has had too much freedom of action, and Prime Minister Fuad Siniora is considering a plan to move the Lebanese Army to the border with Israel. On Friday, the Saudi Press Agency quoted an unnamed Saudi official as blaming Hezbollah for starting the crisis. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Saturday that Hezbollah should "stop resorting to any terrorist methods, including attacking neighboring states."
For Israel, one of the most important developments of the past three weeks has been the restoration of its deterrent capability against terrorism, which had recently eroded despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's successes in the Operation Defensive Shield (Israel's 2002 operation against West Bank terrorists). For nearly 10 months after Israel completely withdrew from Gaza, Palestinian terrorists fired hundreds of missiles into Israel without provoking a substantial IDF military operation in response. For more than six years after Israel withdrew from every inch of Lebanese territory, Hezbollah staged numerous provocations -- the worst of which was the abduction and killing of three IDF soldiers near the border six years ago without any substantial response from Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In the wake of Mr. Olmert's decisive actions, terrorists have more reason than ever to worry about the consequences of provoking Israel.
But the central problem remains: the fact that for, Iran and Syria, terror remains a largely cost-free exercise. Both regimes have been largely spared any of the consequences for their roles in sponsoring the terrorist groups responsible for igniting the current fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. Until the leaders of Iran and Syria lose the ability to fight to the last Lebanese and last Palestinian at no cost to themselves, look for the terror to continue -- with the risk that, at some point in the future, Israel will finally decide to target the rogue regimes themselves.

We will not participate in any crusades, in any holy alliances

As Tensions Rise, U.S. and Moscow Falter on Trade
By JIM RUTENBERG and ANDREW E. KRAMER
The New York Times
July 16, 2006

STRELNA, Russia, Sunday, July 16 — President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin announced that they had failed to come to an agreement on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, and aides said the deal, which had been expected as early as this weekend, was not likely for months.

At a news conference that offered a somewhat rocky prelude to the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 economic powers, Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush also differed over Iraq, the state of Russia’s democracy and Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon.

Though they had a few positive announcements as well — agreeing on initiatives to combat nuclear terrorism and share civilian nuclear material and technology — overall the appearance highlighted growing tensions between former cold war rivals now jockeying for global position.

In the sharpest exchange, Mr. Bush said he had told Mr. Putin during a private dinner here Friday night about “my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq — where there is a free press and free religion — and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope Russia would do the same thing.”

Mr. Putin, standing bolt upright in a dark blue suit, responded dryly, “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly” — a clear dig at the challenges still facing the American-supported government there. Mr. Bush, in a light blue suit and standing more casually than his counterpart, turned to face Mr. Putin, smiled and said, almost to himself, “Just wait.”

Both men played down any friction, saying it was indicative of a frank relationship that remains friendly in spite of the areas where their national interests diverge.

Russia, the host of the Group of 8 summit meeting for the first time, has set an agenda seeking common cause on protecting energy supplies and developing new ones, improving national education systems and combating infectious disease. But exchanges of military fire between Israel and Hezbollah intruded, and an agreement was reached even before the meeting that the attending nations would draft some sort of joint position intended to head off a broader regional conflict.

All sides expected some tension between the United States, which has expressed support for Israel’s need to defend itself, and many of the other participating countries, whose leaders have deemed Israel’s force excessive and have called for a cease-fire. The leaders also are to discuss the dual nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Putin had hoped to kick off the summit meeting, to begin Sunday at the palace erected by Peter the Great nearly 300 years ago in this St. Petersburg suburb, with an announcement that the United States would lift its objection to Russia’s accession into the World Trade Organization. Mr. Putin wants membership as a symbol of the new position of Russia, flush with oil money, in the global economy.

Negotiations between Russian and American trade representatives went into the early morning on Saturday, but could not break through impasses over financial services, food imports and, to a lesser extent, intellectual property rights.

“We’re tough negotiators,” Mr. Bush said, adding that the United States wanted to ensure a deal is reached that Congress will approve. He added that the two sides were close and that news reports had wrongly inflated expectations.

In a briefing that followed the joint appearance by the two presidents, the United States trade representative, Susan Schwab, said it would probably be months before agreement could be reached. Asked if Russia had been correct to believe that a breakthrough was possible by this weekend, Ms. Schwab, who had been involved in the negotiations, said, “I think both sides would have preferred if we had an agreement.”

Her Russian counterparts blamed the United States, complaining in interviews that the sticking points revolved largely around what they considered the small issue of food imports, and the American side’s objection to having Russian inspectors visit farms in the United States.

But Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin agreed to start talks to pave the way for a deal allowing nuclear waste generated from American-produced plutonium from around the world to be stored in Russia — a potential shift in American policy that would be lucrative for Russia. The United States would gain access to Russian uranium. They also agreed to combat the potential spread of nuclear materials to terrorists, a sign that the onetime nuclear rivals now see a common foe in extremists who have made both nations their targets.

Russia analysts called those agreements significant. Graham Allison, a nuclear expert at Harvard who is here monitoring the talks, said the nuclear agreements could have a serious impact in limiting the possibility for rogue states to develop nuclear weapons. “It’s the beginning of something real,” he said.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush offered no breakthroughs on a common approach to reining in the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran; the United States has been calling for a tougher line, while Russia has been advocating a more delicate approach.

Mr. Putin, whose government’s cooperation with Iran has rankled the White House, repeatedly referred to the Iranians as “our partners.”

When a reporter asked a two-part question about whether there were any breakthroughs in countering nuclear proliferation and how he rated the state of United States-Russian relations, Mr. Putin began, “We will not participate in any crusades, in any holy alliances,” which analysts here took as a signal to Iran that Russia was not fully aligned with Mr. Bush, or as a dig at Mr. Bush’s campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East, or both.

But Mr. Putin continued, “Our common goal is to make the world a more secure place, and certainly we’ll be working with all our partners, including the United States, in order to address this problem.”

Asked what he took Mr. Putin to have meant by “holy alliance” and “crusade,” Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said during a news briefing here, “You know, I asked myself the same question.”

Mr. Hadley said the president did not specifically broach the subject that most severely divides the leaders in their approach to Iran: the potential imposition of sanctions if it does not give up its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Putin had sidestepped the question of sanctions.

Yet, the Russian leader emphasized the need for cooperation as the G-8 meetings begin.

“If we elaborate common approaches to this difficult problem, we will see to it that our joint decisions are fulfilled,” Mr. Putin said. “This is what we said honestly and directly to our Iranian partners.”

Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush agreed that Hezbollah was the provocateur in the escalating crisis in the Middle East. “I agree with the premise that it is absolutely unacceptable to try and reach this or that goal,” Mr. Putin said, “through abductions, through carrying out strikes against an independent state from the territory of another state.”

Mr. Putin went on to chide Israel. “At the same time, we work under the assumption that the use of force should be balanced,” he said. “Escalation of violence, in our opinion, will not yield positive results.”

In contrast, Mr. Bush declined to criticize Israel, saying firmly: “In my judgment, the best way to stop the violence is to understand why the violence occurred in the first place. And that’s because Hezbollah has been launching rocket attacks out of Lebanon into Israel.” He blamed Syria for supporting Hezbollah and called upon its leadership to intervene.

Pressed at a late-night news conference on his stance on Israel, Mr. Putin said he wished the conflict could be resolved by peaceful means. The Russians, he said, “do get the impression that the aims of Israeli go beyond just recovering their kidnapped soldiers,” according to a translator. He did not elaborate. Both leaders said their relationship was stronger than many acknowledge.

“We’ve got people in Russia questioning U.S. motives, people in America questioning Russian motives,” Mr. Bush said. “But that’s what happens when you have — when you’re big nations that have got influence, where you’ve got leaders willing to make tough decisions.”

Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin’s joint appearance came after a much friendlier social call the evening before, when the first couples had a private dinner at the palace.

Both men indicated that though it was supposed to be a social call, the conversation veered into more serious matters, and Mr. Bush said they discussed their governing philosophies. “I don’t expect Russia to look like the United States,” Mr. Bush said. “As Vladimir pointedly reminded me last night, we have a different history, different traditions.”

Meanwhile, in downtown St. Petersburg, protesters criticized both men. At one end of Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s historic main boulevard, protesters gathered, chanting, “We need another Russia and Russia without Putin.” Some held signs denouncing the United States and the NATO expansion it backs.

As the demonstrators tried to march, lines of riot police officers moved in. Wearing helmets and some with shields, they beat several young men and dragged them away to waiting buses. The first two men arrested were punched by plainclothes officers waiting in a bus.