The Northern Front
When Secretary Rice arrives tomorrow at the Israeli capital of Jerusalem, the central question will concern her priorities. Is she going to expend her time and energy seeking to revive the Annapolis process, freshly boycotted by the Palestinian side? Or will she make it her priority to gain a feel for the fact that the latest war in the Levant is already being levied and start to analyze the patterns that portend the danger of a wider conflict?
On the southern front, Israeli missiles have already hit targets deep inside Gaza, including the offices of Prime Minister Haniya. The fighting has escalated since February 25, when Israelis watched news footage of eight-year-old Maria Haimov drag her ten-year-old brother, Yossi, to a nearby hospital, after shrapnel from a Qassam rocket nearly severed the boy's arm after hitting an elementary school in Sderot. Israel's government is trying to prevent the more powerful, Iranian made Katusha rockets from hitting power grids in Ashkelon. A ground offensive into Gaza now seems both logical and inevitable.
Things are even more dangerous on the northern front, where the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed revenge on Israel for the assassination last month in Damascus of Imadh Mugniyah. United States Ship Cole, refurbished from the holing it suffered in 2000 in the attack by Al Qaeda at Aden, steamed Thursday to Lebanese territorial waters as a warning to both Hezbollah and Syria. Saudi Arabia just issued an order to evacuate its citizens from Lebanon, expecting clashes in Beirut over the upcoming elections.
All this comes as Iran girds for a scheduled vote this week on a third United Nations Security Council resolution condemning its enrichment of fuel for an atom bomb. On Thursday, the Paris based Financial Action Task Force sent a warning to its member states that Iran's banking system was tainted by terrorist financing, a designation that erases the last vestige of legitimacy from the Islamic Republic's financial system.
It's a pattern reminiscent of 2006, when Iranian and Syrian proxies in Lebanon distracted the world from the debates over the first U.N. resolution condemning Iranian uranium enrichment. Back then America and most of the free world supported Israel initially as it launched an air war that failed to destroy Hezbollah and succeeded in engendering enmity from many free Lebanese who privately supported what at first seemed a war on Hezbollah, though these columns, in an editorial issued on July 17 under the headline "Wrong Airport," argued that the right target was not Beirut but Damascus.
"Hezbollah wouldn't have launched a raid into Israel and kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers without the approval of Iran or Damascus. But the Syrians and the Iranians have felt no penalty for that action," we wrote. It is something for Secretary Rice to focus on as the prospect of another Lebanon war looms. Much of this war is being run out of Iran's embassy in Beirut — and President Assad's summer palace, which Israeli jets buzzed as warnings for prior Hezbollah aggressions in 2005 and 2006.
There is some precedent for this. In 1998, in the middle of a terror campaign against Turkish civilians and diplomats and when Mr. Assad's father, Hafez, harbored Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish terrorist faction known as the PKK, Turkey threatened an invasion of Syria. Ocalan soon fled to Russia, then Italy, Greece, and eventually Kenya, where the Turks finally caught up with him and brought him to justice. The point is that Iran and Syria have not been made to pay a price for levying war by proxy in the Levant.
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Their machinations must come as a disappointment to Ms. Rice. Only three months ago, she and President Bush promised the world a two state solution by 2009. Even Syria was invited to the ceremonial meetings at the campus at Annapolis. Sunday, the Palestinian Arab "peace partner," President Abbas suspended Fatah's participation in those talks, and is now hinting that Fatah will join the armed resistance. He dropped those hints last week to a Jordanian newspaper, boasting of being one of the first Palestinians to aim his gun at the Israeli occupiers in 1965, two years before Israel won the disputed territories in Gaza, Golan, and the West Bank. If Ms. Rice spends her time in Jerusalem cajoling Mr. Abbas to make promises she is well aware the weak government in Ramallah is in no position to keep, she runs the risk of squandering American prestige. Instead, a better use of her time would be working on the exact language her diplomats will issue to support any strikes by Israel against Iranian and Syrian targets in the event their proxies in Lebanon open a new front.
