I doubt Isreal would accept that if that's the final format.

Posted by simrud:

Well looks like UN is passing a resolution today.

And from it says online, as far as I found, it is a spectacular faliure. They are basically returning everything to the pre-war status. Not a word in the resolution about disarming Hizbollah. And the UN troops are going in under chapter 6, hence can't use force, unless directly assualted.

I know this makes Arabs happy, but how does this make the situation any better for the future?

Hezbollah cannot be permitted to have the ability to declare victory in any way, shape, or form.

We must crush them.

Israel has done, is doing and will do all it is able to do in order to effect the return home of the sons," Olmert told his cabinet at the outset of its weekly session on Sunday.

Israel Radio quoted Olmert as telling ministers he would name a senior official to deal with the issue and "a tremendous struggle is being waged to free them."

Haaretz said Israel would negotiate the release of the troops and that in exchange Israel would be ready to free several Lebanese prisoners and about 20 other Hizbollah men it has captured during its current offensive in Lebanon.

Dude Gaza is no South Lebanon. It is not a rocky region. You can't hide big rockets in there. And Grad is EXPENSIVE, and is not even sold. Gaza is tiny, a flat surface. If they ever shoot something big and hurta lot of people, 30000 troops with 500 tanks will clean the area out in a few days. You will see hundreds of thousands of refuges, but if they actually do shoot rockets with Grad's level of destruction, it will be all out war, and no response will be considered unjustified.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Israel humbled by arms from Iran
By Adrian Blomfield in Ghandouriyeh

(Filed: 15/08/2006)

Abandoned Hizbollah positions in Lebanon yesterday revealed conclusive evidence that Syria - and almost certainly Iran - provided the anti-tank missiles that have blunted the power of Israel's once invincible armour.

After one of the fiercest confrontations of the war, Israeli forces took the small town of Ghandouriyeh, east of the southern city of Tyre, on Sunday evening, hours before a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations took effect.


Israeli soldiers hold a Israeli flag after returning from Lebanon
At least 24 Israeli soldiers were killed in the advance on the strategic hilltop town as Hizbollah fighters were pushed back to its outskirts, abandoning many weapons.

The discovery helped to explain the slow progress made by Israeli ground forces in nearly five weeks of a war which Hizbollah last night claimed as "a historic victory." Israeli political and military leaders are facing mounting criticism over the conduct of the offensive, which was intended to smash the Iranian-backed Shia militia.

Outside one of the town's two mosques a van was found filled with green casings about 6ft long. The serial numbers identified them as AT-5 Spandrel anti-tank missiles. The wire-guided weapon was developed in Russia but Iran began making a copy in 2000.

Beyond no-man's land, in the east of the village, was evidence of Syrian-supplied hardware. In a garden next to a junction used as an outpost by Hizbollah lay eight Kornet anti-tank rockets, described by Brig Mickey Edelstein, the commander of the Nahal troops who took Ghandouriyeh, as "some of the best in the world".

Written underneath a contract number on each casing were the words: "Customer: Ministry of Defence of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia."

Brig Edelstein said: "If they tell you that Syria knew nothing about this, just look. This is the evidence. Proof, not just talk."

The discovery of the origin of the weapons proved to the Israelis that their enemy was not a ragged and lightly armed militia but a semi-professional army equipped by Syria and Iran to take on Israel. The weapons require serious training to operate and could be beyond the capabilities of some supposedly regular armies in the Middle East. The Kornet was unveiled by Russia in 1994. It is laser-guided, has a range of three miles and carries a double warhead capable of penetrating the reactive armour on Israeli Merkava tanks. Russia started supplying them to Syria in 1998.

Israeli forces were taken by surprise by the sophistication of the anti-tank weapons they faced. They are believed to have accounted for many of the 116 deaths the army suffered. Dozens of tanks were hit and an unknown number destroyed.

The missiles were also used against infantry, in one case bringing down a house and killing nine soldiers. They played an important part in Hizbollah's tactics of using a network of concealed positions to set up ambushes for the Israelis as they inched in. Last night, Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, said his men had achieved "a strategic, historic victory" over "a confused, cowardly and defea-ted" enemy. He said the militia would not disarm, as Israel and the UN Security Council were demanding. It would be "immoral, incorrect and inappropriate," he said. "It is the wrong timing on a pyschological and moral level."

As the militia leader was claiming victory, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, defended his handling of the crisis and said that the massive air, ground and sea attack had changed the face of the Middle East. But he admitted that the military and political leadership was guilty of "shortcomings", not least in underestimating the threat from anti-tank weapons.

Critics say that he placed too much faith in the ability of the air force to break the back of Hizbollah and delayed launching a major ground offensive until it was too late.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader and a rival, said: "There were many failures - failures on identifying the threat, failures in preparing to meet the threat, failures in the management of the war, failures in the management of the home front."

Last night, President George W. Bush blamed Iran and Syria for fomenting the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah. "We can only imagine how much more dangerous this conflict would be if Iran had the nuclear weapon it seeks," he said.

http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=w060814&s=halevi081506

Israel's Broken Heart.
Final Reckoning
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 08.15.06
owever hard Ehud Olmert tries to spin it, the U.N. ceasefire that began yesterday is a disaster for Israel and for the war on terrorism generally. With an unprecedented green light from Washington to do whatever necessary to uproot the Iranian front line against Israel, and with a level of national unity and willingness to sacrifice unseen here since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, our leaders squandered weeks restraining the army and fighting a pretend war. Only in the two days before the ceasefire was the army finally given the go-ahead to fight a real war.

But, by then, the U.N. resolution had codified the terms of Israel's defeat. The resolution doesn't require the immediate return of our kidnapped soldiers, but does urgently place the Shebaa Farms on the international agenda--as if the Lebanese jihadists fired some 4,000 rockets at the Israeli homefront over the fate of a bare mountain that the United Nations concluded in 1967 belonged not to Lebanon but Syria. Worst of all, it once again entrusts the security of Israel's northern border to the inept unifil. As one outraged TV anchor put it, Israeli towns were exposed to the worst attacks since the nation's founding, a million residents of the Galilee fled or sat in shelters for a month, more than 150 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed along with nearly a thousand Lebanese--all in order to ensure the return of U.N. peacekeepers to southern Lebanon.



his is a nation whose heart has been broken: by our failure to uproot the jihadist threat, which will return for another and far more deadly round; by the economic devastation of the Galilee and of a neighboring land we didn't want to attack; by the heroism of our soldiers and the hesitations of our politicians; by the young men buried and crippled in a war we prevented ourselves from winning; by foreign journalists who can't tell the difference between good and evil; by European leaders who equate an army that tries to avoid civilian causalities with a terrorist group that revels in them; by a United Nations that questions Israel's right to defend itself; and by growing voices on the left who question Israel's right to exist at all.

At least some of the disasters of the past weeks were self-inflicted. We forfeited the public relations battle that was, in part, Israel's to lose. How is it possible that we failed to explain the justness of a war fought against a genocidal enemy who attacked us across our U.N.-sanctioned international border? It's hard to remember now, but we began this war with the sympathy of a large part of the international community. Some Arab leaders, for the first time in the history of the Middle East conflict, actually blamed other Arabs for initiating hostilities with Israel. That response came when Israel seemed determined to defeat Hezbollah; but, as the weeks dragged on and Hezbollah appeared to be winning, moderate Arabs adjusted accordingly. They didn't switch sides because we were fighting too assertively but because we weren't fighting assertively enough.

Even before the shooting stopped, the reckoning here had already begun. There are widespread expectations of dismissals for senior military commanders who--when finally given the chance to end the Hezbollah threat they had been warning about for almost 25 years--couldn't implement a creative battle plan. But demands for accountability won't be confined to the army alone. Journalist Ari Shavit, who has taken on something of the role of Motti Ashkenazi--the reservist soldier who led the movement to bring down the government of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan after the Yom Kippur War--wrote a front-page article in Haaretz calling for Olmert's resignation. And that is only the opening shot. Even Maariv's Ben Caspit, one of Israel's most pro-Olmert journalists, published an imaginary Olmert speech of apology to the nation. A cartoon in Maariv showed Olmert as a boy playing with a yo-yo inscribed with israel defense forces. None of Israel's wars was ever fought with greater micromanagement by a government, and no government was ever less qualified to manage a war as this one. Just as the post-Yom Kippur War period destroyed military and political careers and eventually led to the collapse of the Labor Party's hegemony, so will the post-Lebanon period end careers and perhaps even the short-lived Kadima Party experiment.

A long list of reckonings awaits the Israeli public. There's the scandal of the government's abandonment of tens of thousands of poor Israelis who lacked the means to escape the north and were confined for weeks in public shelters, their needs largely tended to by volunteers. There's the growing bitterness between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis, many of whom supported Hezbollah in a war most Jews saw as an existential attack on the state. And there's the emergency need to resurrect the military reserves, which have been so neglected that a majority of men over 21 don't even serve anymore and those that do tend to feel like suckers.

Still, in the Jewish calendar, the summer weeks after the fast of the Ninth of Av, commemorating the destruction of the Temple, are a time of consolation. "Be consoled, be consoled, my people," we read from the Torah on the Sabbath after the fast. And so we console ourselves with the substantial achievements of the people of Israel during this month of war. First, our undiminished capacity for unity. My favorite symbol of that unity is the antiwar rapper, Muki, whose hit song during the era of Palestinian suicide bombings lamented the absence of justice for the Palestinians but who, this time, insisted that the army needs to "finish the job" against Hezbollah. Second, our middle-class children, with their cell phones, iPods, and pizza deliveries to their army bases. In intimate combat, they repeatedly bested Hezbollah fighters, even though the terrorists had the advantage of familiar terrain. This generation has given us some of Israel's most powerful images of heroism, like the soldier from a West Bank settlement and father of two young children who leaped onto a grenade to save his friends, shouting the Shema--the prayer of God's oneness--just before the grenade exploded. Along with the recriminations, there will be many medals of valor awarded in the coming weeks.

But the last month's fighting is only one battle in the jihadist war against Israel's homefront that began with the second intifada in September 2000. Israel won the first phase of that war, the four years of suicide bombings that lasted until 2004. Now, in the second phase, we've lost the battle against the rockets. But the qualities this heartbreak has revealed --unity and sacrifice and faith in the justness of our cause--will ensure our eventual victory in the next, inevitable, bitter round. Such is the nature of consolation in Israel in the summer of 2006.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a foreign correspondent for The New Republic and senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.

Iran, Syria Praise Hezbollah, Mock U.S.
Aug 15 12:35 PM US/Eastern
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Hezbollah has "hoisted the banner of victory" over Israel and toppled U.S.-led plans for the Middle East. Hezbollah's main backers _ Iran and Syria _ struck nearly identical tones a day after a cease-fire took effect in Lebanon: heaping praise on the guerrillas as perceived victors for the Islamic world and claiming that Western influence in the region was dealt a serious blow.

"God's promises have come true," Ahmadinejad told a huge crowd in Arbadil in northwestern Iran. "On one side, it's corrupt powers of the criminal U.S. and Britain and the Zionists ... with modern bombs and planes. And on the other side is a group of pious youth relying on God."



In Damascus, Syrian President Syrian President Bashar Assad said Washington's plans for the Middle East were turned into "an illusion" by Hezbollah's resistance to the Israeli military during the 34-day conflict.

Israel "was defeated" and Hezbollah "hoisted the banner of victory," Ahmadinejad told the crowd, including many people waving yellow Hezbollah banners and Iranian flags.

Ahmadinejad drew cheers when he said Hezbollah foiled what he called the plans of Washington and its allies "to create the so-called new Middle East."

"The people of the region are also after the new Middle East, but a Middle East that is free from U.S. and British domination," he said.

After the war broke out July 12, Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders repeatedly denounced the U.N. Security Council for moving slowly toward a cease-fire. They also sharply criticized other Muslim nations for what Iran considered a failure to rally around Hezbollah and Lebanese civilians.

Ahmadinejad said the United Nations should force war reparations from Israel and its allies, led by the United States.

"Those who were involved in inflicting damage to the Lebanese nation are responsible," he said.

Ahmadinejad has drawn worldwide condemnation for calling for Israel's destruction and describing the Holocaust as a myth.

Earlier Tuesday, a hard-line Iranian cleric warned Israel that Iran's new long-range missiles will land in Tel Aviv if the Jewish state should attack Iran, state-run television said.

Ahmad Khatami, a mid-ranking cleric, declared that Israel would face dire consequences if it "makes an iota of aggression against Iran."

"They must fear the day 2,000-kilometer (1,250-mile)range missiles land in the heart of Tel Aviv," he said.

Khatami is a Friday prayer leader in Tehran and a member of the Assembly of Experts, a clerical panel that has the power to choose or dismiss Iran's top leader, but he is not considered a government official.

In his address, Ahmadinejad also said his government would stick by its plans to reply on Aug. 22 to a package of Western economic and technology incentives offered in exchange for a suspension of Iranian uranium enrichment.

The U.N. Security Council has told Iran it must halt enrichment by Aug. 31 or face possible sanctions.

Western nations, led by the United States, claim Iran is using its nuclear program as a cover for developing atomic weapons in violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Iran denies the allegations, saying its program has the peaceful goal of generating electricity with nuclear reactors

I hate to say I told you so Color, but I don't know how the left leaning Jews were ever able to beleive what they beleive in, in the first place. This entire war is the moral legacy of the many supporters of the "peace for land" idea, a most outlandhish principle.

The pullout out of Gaza and Lebanon, w/out a uniform acceptance by every muslim nation of the right of Israel to exist is a mockery to common sense. The idea of unilateral retreat is just as bad. Israel only has two choices. Have its civilians die, or have its soldiers die. The nation of Israel exists because of the blood of its soldiers, and nothing else.

I found it ironic how the hub of the pro appeasement movement Haifa, suffered the most destruction. Don't take it the wrong way, but it is my hope, that people learned their lesson. The only thing that pullin out of the West Bank will do is have rockets fallin in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

At this point if the demographic problem is indeed such a danger, and more Jews are not willin to come, if I were Israel, I would start accepting immigraiton from non-muslim countires, mabye a place like Sudan, and provide benefits for them to settle in the West bank. There are already refuges being smuggled to Israel though Egypt by the Beduins from Sudan. Let the country become a bastion anti militant islam, open the door to non Jewish immigration to the West Bank and beyond, as long as they agree to become full Isareli citizens and serve in the army. Grow the populatoin to over 12 mil and the regular army to 300000 and tell the world to suck it.

[Edited by - simrud on 08-15-2006 8:35 PM]

Wednesday » August 16 » 2006

Nations refuse to disarm Hezbollah
U.S., France, UN and Lebanon put deal in jeopardy

Allan Woods
CanWest News Service

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

WASHINGTON - The countries tasked with upholding the shaky truce in Lebanon appeared unwilling to force the disarmament of Hezbollah yesterday, a development that threatens to delay the creation of a massive United Nations peacekeeping force and could ultimately set off fresh conflict in the region.

France, the United States, the United Nations and Lebanon itself have all refused to accept responsibility for stripping the Lebanese Shiite militia of their weapons, despite a key element of the UN resolution that calls for the group to give up its firepower and vacate the southern part of the country.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said on Monday that his force will not be pressured into disarming, and he gained key support yesterday from Lebanon's Defence Minister, Elian Murr, who has refused to take up the task of disarmament.

The Lebanese Cabinet agreed to the UN resolution on Saturday, but Mr. Murr explained that his job is not disarmament, but rather to "ensure the security of the [Islamic] Resistance and citizens, to protect the victory of the Resistance."

The Islamic Resistance is the armed wing of Hezbollah. London's al-Hayat newspaper reported yesterday that the Lebanese government is considering allowing fighters to keep their weapons in the southern border zone in violation of the UN resolution.

The about-face is giving the rest of the world second thoughts as well, particularly France, which lost 58 French soldiers to a Hezbollah suicide attack that also killed 231 U.S. Marines the last time it was deployed in Beirut, in 1983.

Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French Foreign Minister, warned yesterday that France, which is expected to contribute 4,000 troops and lead the UN mission, will stay out of Lebanon until it receives guarantees Hezbollah has disarmed. He is expected to discuss the issue at meetings with the Lebanese government in Beirut today. Similarly, both the United States, which does not plan to send troops to Lebanon, and Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the French commander of UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force currently on the ground, said it is up to the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its weapons.

"It is Lebanon that is responsible for determining its own future in this regard," David Welch, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told reporters in Washington yesterday. "By passing this resolution 15-0, unanimously in the Security Council, the world's voice has been made crystal clear."

A spokesman for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in New York that it is up to Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah, but that the UN would offer help to enforce the process. The crisis in the Israel-Lebanon conflict comes as the international community scrambles to determine which countries will contribute to the promised 15,000-troop UN peacekeeping force, and how soon they can get there.

A senior UN official told the BBC the world body is aiming to get an advance force of up to 3,500 troops into Lebanon within two weeks. Lebanon plans to start moving 15,000 of its own soldiers into the southern part of the country this week, and Israel said it could pull out of Lebanon within 10 days. But Maj.-Gen. Pellegrini told France's Le Monde newspaper yesterday that it could take up to one year to get the full force in place in southern Lebanon. Sean McCormack, a U.S. State Department spokesman, said the force needs to be deployed "on a much more urgent basis than that."

"Nobody believes that deploying the force in months is acceptable," he said yesterday.

The question of how quickly the UN force can be in place is vital because last Friday's resolution calls for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces in southern Lebanon at the same time as the international force takes up its positions.

Should the UN force fail to materialize, Israel faces a choice of remaining in southern Lebanon, where skirmishes with Hezbollah fighters continued yesterday, or accepting the presence of a weak Lebanese army as a buffer between it and Hezbollah.

Formal offers of troop contributions are expected to start coming in tomorrow. The bulk of the force is expected to be made of French and Italian troops. Turkey, Indonesia, Spain and Morocco have also been mentioned as potential contributors. Yet as much of the world watches the slow diplomatic process of cleaning up after a war, Israel has already set its sights on what it considers the larger threat to Middle East peace -- Iran.

Shimon Peres, Israel's deputy prime minister, was meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss the situation in the Middle East ahead of a North American tour to raise what is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstructions efforts in northern Israel, which was hit hard in the fighting.

U.S. President George W. Bush has been equally vocal about what he calls the destabilizing role that Iran plays in the Middle East, particularly since the Israel-Lebanon conflict began last month. Earlier this week, he warned that it would have been worse had Iran possessed "the nuclear weapon it seeks."

Annan: Israeli Raid Violates Cease-Fire
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Aug 19, 7:22 PM (ET)

By SAM F. GHATTAS

(AP) Lebanese citizens inspect the crater at a bridge that was destroyed when Israeli missiles targeted...
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NEW YORK (AP) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Saturday that an early-morning Israeli raid against Hezbollah in eastern Lebanon violated the 6-day-old cease-fire brokered by the United Nations. An Israeli officer was killed, and two soldiers wounded, when Israeli commandos raided a Hezbollah stronghold deep in Lebanon, resulting in a fierce gunbattle.
Israel said the raid was launched to stop arms smuggling from Iran and Syria to the militant Shiite fighters, while Lebanon's Prime Minister Fuad Saniora called the operation a "flagrant violation" of the U.N. truce.
There were no signs of further clashes, but the flare-up underlined worries about the fragility of the cease-fire as the U.N. pleaded for nations to send troops to an international force in southern Lebanon that is to separate Israeli and Hezbollah fighters.
A contingent of 49 French soldiers landed in the south Saturday, providing the first reinforcements for the 2,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission known as UNIFIL that has been stationed in the region for years. About 200 more were expected next week.
They were the first additions to what is intended to grow into a 15,000-soldier U.N. force to police the truce with an equal number of Lebanese soldiers. France leads UNIFIL and already had 200 soldiers in Lebanon before the reinforcements.
But with Europe moving slowly to provide more troops, Israel warned it would continue to act on its own to enforce an arms embargo on the Lebanese guerrilla group until the Lebanese army and an expanded U.N. peacekeeping force are in place.
"If the Syrians and Iran continue to arm Hezbollah in violation of the resolution, Israel is entitled to act to defend the principle of the arms embargo," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. "Once the Lebanese army and the international forces are active ... then such Israeli activity will become superfluous."