Condi, Kofi, And The War

What is it anyway about US Secretaries of State being co-opted by the very problems they are tasked with solving?
In a detailed post today, Rick Moran explains why he thinks Condi Rice has outlived her usefulness as Secretary of State:

Secretary Rice bears most of the responsibility for agreeing to a UN cease fire resolution with little prospect that it will do anything that it says it will. All it has done is prevented Israel from continuing an offensive that was just starting to make rapid progress in inflicting the kind of damage on Hizbullah that would have made Nasrallah’s claims of “victory” ring hollow. For this reason, her continued usefulness to the President should be called into question.

Moran is not alone in his doubts regarding her performance on our behalf (and Israel’s) at the UN last week. Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post carried this ominous bit of reality:

The IDF will have to resume operations in Lebanon if the expanded United Nations force being assembled does not fulfill its obligation to dismantle Hizbullah, an official in the Prime Minister’s Office warned on Tuesday.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly reached a deal allowing Hizbullah to keep its weapons but refrain from exhibiting them in public. Israeli officials called the arrangement a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which passed over the weekend and was approved on Sunday by the cabinet.
“The resolution is clear that Hizbullah needs to be removed from the border area, embargoed and dismantled,” the official said. “If the resolution is not implemented, we will have to take action to prevent the rearming of Hizbullah. I don’t think backtracking will serve any useful purpose. There has to be pressure on Hizbullah to disarm or there will have to be another round.” …
Annan angered Israeli officials when he told Channel 2 on Tuesday that “dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN,” which could only help Lebanon disarm the organization. Annan upset officials further when he said that deploying international forces in Lebanon would take “weeks or months,” and not days as expected.

Nor is the UN Secretary Generalt the only one who has taken a studiously blasé approach to the threat still posed by Hezbollah. From yesterday’s USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The 15,000-member U.N. force being created for southern Lebanon will keep the peace and enforce an international arms embargo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday, but it won’t be charged with disarming Hezbollah guerrillas.
That “political agreement” will be the responsibility of the Lebanese, Rice said in an interview with USA TODAY. In the past, the Lebanese government has been unwilling or unable to disarm Hezbollah, a movement that is now part of the government itself. A United Nations resolution on the books since September 2004 has called for all Lebanese militias to disarm.
“I don’t think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah,” Rice said. “I think it’s a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily.”
If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, “one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post carried Ms. Rice’s oddly inarticulate OpEd on the subject.

Though we hope that it will lead to a permanent cease-fire, no one should expect an immediate stop to all acts of violence. This is a fragile cease-fire, and all parties must work to strengthen it. Our diplomacy has helped end a war. Now comes the long, hard work to secure the peace.
Looking ahead, our most pressing challenge is to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people within Lebanon to return to their homes and rebuild their lives.

And Ed Morrisey had this pithy comment:

Of course the problem is implementation — that’s been the problem all along. The UN has demanded the disarming of Hezbollah before, but no one bothered to do it. Israel finally decided to take the task on itself after tiring of the empty rhetoric coming from Turtle Bay. The most pressing issue is this implementation, not the hand-wringing over civilian displacement, a concern that Rice does not extend to the hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis.

Ed’s right, of course. The UN is clearly not going to do anything about Hezbollah, despite its own sanctimonious pronouncements to the contrary. And the Lebanese “army” certainly isn’t about to disarm Hezbollah either. The Lebanese government has already announced as much. Meanwhile, the US appears to have sold out our one middle east ally in exchange for a meaningless Security Council Resolution that only exacerbates Israel’s efforts at self-preservation.
All UNSCR 1701 does is put everything on hold for the next generation of leaders to deal with. Problem is, next time around, we may well be talking about nukes instead of Katyushas and tanks. This is a “deal” Jimmy Carter would be proud of.