The United States gave Israel the “green light” for its attack in responding to Hezbollah — and the signal light has now turned “yellow” light because it’s about to turn red, the Guardian reports:
The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.
The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels.
“It’s clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week,” a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.
US strategy in allowing Israel this freedom for a limited period has several objectives, one of which is delivering a slap to Iran and Syria, who Washington claims are directing Hizbullah and Hamas militants from behind the scenes.
It’s a window of opportunity that clearly will have some limits due to both backlash factors and the desire not to have the situation spin even more out of control than it has in the Middle East:
The US is publicly denying any role in setting a time frame for Israeli strikes. When asked whether the US was holding back diplomatically, Tony Snow, the White House’s press spokesman, said yesterday: “No, no; the insinuation there is that there is active military planning, collaboration or collusion, between the United States and Israel – and there isn’t … the US has been in the lead of the diplomatic efforts, issuing repeated calls for restrain,t but at the same time putting together an international consensus. You’ve got to remember who was responsible for this: Hizbullah … It would be misleading to say the United States hasn’t been engaged. We’ve been deeply engaged.”
Steven Cook, a specialist in US-Middle East policy at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, said: “It’s abundantly clear [that US policy is] to give the Israelis the opportunity to strike a blow at Hizbullah …
“They have global reach, and prior to 9/11 they killed more Americans than any other group. But the Israelis are overplaying their hand.”
Israel is already laying the ground for negotiations. “We are beginning a diplomatic process alongside the military operation that will continue,” said Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, yesterday. “The diplomatic process is not meant to shorten the window of time of the army’s operation, but rather is meant to be an extension of it and to prevent a need for future military operations,” she added.
So there are clearly putative, deterrent and military objectives to this operation.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Hezbollah announced that it’s ready to attack Israeli and American “interests” worldwide — which would be yet another escalation of this conflict:
Iran’s Hizbollah, which claims links to the Lebanese group of the same name, said on Tuesday it stood ready to attack Israeli and U.S. interests worldwide.
“We have 2,000 volunteers who have registered since last year,” said Iranian Hizbollah’s spokesman Mojtaba Bigdeli, speaking by telephone from the central seminary city of Qom.
“They have been trained and they can become fully armed. We are ready to dispatch them to every corner of the world to jeopardise Israel and America’s interests. We are only waiting for the Supreme Leader’s green light to take action. If America wants to ignite World War Three … we welcome it,” he said.
Iranian religious organisations have made great public show of recruiting volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations” in recent years, usually threatening U.S. interests in case of any attack against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme.
But there is no record of an Iranian volunteer from these recruitment campaigns taking part in an attack.
Iran’s Hizbollah (Party of God) says it is spiritually bound to Shi’ite Muslim guerrillas in Lebanon but its command structure and funding are unclear.
Despite Iranian Hizbollah’s insistence that it takes orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, government ministries say Hizbollah does not implement official policy. Iran’s government has said it hopes for a diplomatic solution to the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.
This Tehran-datelined Reuters story notes that Tehran did help fund Hezbollah years ago but is insisting it hasn’t contributed “troops or weapons” in the present conflict, even though Israel says it has found some Iranian government involvement.
It’s worth nothing that most analysts, including official diplomatic analysts and mainstream news media analysts, DO believe that Hezbollah is a kind of surrogate for the Iranian government in this conflict….official protestations to the contrary.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.