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War Rhetoric Pushes Region Towards Unknown

Lebanon is a “combustible region” in the framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the place for a potential Israeli attack on Hezbollah to take away Tehran’s ability to retaliate to any attempt on Iran’s nuclear plants, simultaneously with a suggestion to press Syria to negotiate with Hezbollah.

These were the recommendations of an American report issued Thursday in Washington, Lebanese Assafir daily said.

According to the newspaper’s correspondent in the US capital, Joe Maakaron, this report considers Hezbollah’s ‘arsenal’ as more powerful today in terms of quality and quantity, than it was in 2006.
The report suggests that despite the border between “Israel” and Lebanon is the calmest in decades, there are increasing speculations that Lebanon’s Third War could erupt sometime within 12 to 18 months, Maakaron reported.

In his op-ed in the Al-Anwar newspaper, Rafiq Khoury criticized the UN Security Council for doing nothing but expressing concern over the situation in the Middle East.
Khoury said that the gap between implementing UNSCR 1701 (which ended hostilities in Lebanon in 2006) and the reality on the ground was deep. “The discussion of UN S.G. Ban Ki-moon’s rotational report on the implementation of resolution 1701 was mere competition in expressing concern.”
“Concern is not politics. It is best said that “concern” is the pseudonym of ‘failure to make effective policies. It ends with adapting to reality within the framework of a demanded formula: Coordination between the Lebanese Army and the UNIFIL and the freedom of movement for the UNIFIL in areas of operation; hence the peak of incompetence is when the UN Security Council becomes the UN ‘Concerns” Council,” concluded Khoury.

Meanwhile, Patrick Seale said in an article posted on the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat that the Obama-Netanyahu meeting in Washington earlier this month indicates that the United States will turn a blind eye to any Israeli attack on Iran, particularly when there is no evidence that Washington had warned Tel Aviv against any such attack.
According to Seale, should Tehran make additional improvement in the field of enriching uranium, Israel could find itself forced to attack knowing that it would be covered by the US. He added that American newspapers have reported that Netanyahu had promised the US administration to inform it before any attack on the Islamic Republic.
Seale concluded saying that “we should wait and see whether negotiations with Iran would resume in September or whether a surprise Israeli attack this summer would draw a new dimension of violence and destruction to the Middle East.”

More than half of Americans would support Israel taking military action against Iran, according to a poll released on Wednesday.
The poll was conducted by TIPP, the polling unit of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, a U.S. research firm of both syndicated and custom Market Research solutions.
The NewsMax website also reported on Thursday that a separate Pew Research poll showed similar results, with 66 percent of Americans preferring a strike, while 24 percent objected to it.

Analysts and commentators in the Middle East are expecting a war, soon. However, a traffic of opinions, revelations, analyses, and political statements, namely in the US and Israel, make it hard to predict the time and the place of the new war which would most probably inflame the region.

Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria have expressed full readiness to confront an Israeli war in the region. Oddly enough, the Israeli media have openly stated that the Zionist entity was far from ready to engage in an armed conflict. The war rhetoric, however, and Israel’s intentions and its history of hasty decisions, leave the region on the brink of serious deterioration

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