Time for Bush to start listening

Both President Bush and Condoleezza Rice were at pains to paint Hezbollah as the real culprit, a terrorist organization that like other terrorists "try to stop the advance of democracy, spread their Jehadist message, a message totalitarian in nature, Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism."

If the Israeli aim was to convey a message to the Lebanese people that Israel would continue to inflict murder and mayhem till the Lebanese people rejected Hezbollah, then surely the strategy has failed.

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In a recent survey Hezbollah, born out of 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, albeit inspired by the Islamic Revolution of Iran, has registered increased support not only among the Shiites, but also among the Sunnis, the Christians, and other groups who see Hezbollah as the defender of Lebanese sovereignty.

Middle East affairs expert Shibley Telhami notes the growing support for Hezbollah throughout the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, one of the strongest Sunni organizations in the Arab world, has rejected a fatwa given be a Saudi religious authority prohibiting help to the Hezbollah. The Sunni head of the Arab Lawyers Union expressed his total solidarity with Hezbollah's defense of Lebanon against Israel.

Even Sunni al-Qaeda, that previously used to express disdain for Hezbollah for practicing a "heretical form of Islam," has called upon all Muslims to unite against Israeli injustice. "What was especially telling in Zawahiri's [recent] speech," writes Telhami, "was that religious Puritanism and sectarianism were no longer topics."

Hamas's victory in Palestinian elections, Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary gains in Egypt, Hezbollah's defense of Lebanon against Israeli disproportionate use of force on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure to secure the release the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by the Hezbollah have been lumped together by the Bush administration as reflective of "Islamic radicalism."

In the process of displaying unstinted support for Israel, the Bush administration has totally ignored the OIC Summit's Putrajaya Declaration of August 3 and the Arab League's full support of the Lebanese government's 7-point plan calling for immediate cease-fire, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, greater UN international force in south Lebanon, and help rebuild the shattered Lebanese economy.

The Bush administration's reluctance to admit that the root cause of the turbulence in the Middle East is its refusal to pressurize Israel for an equitable solution of the Palestinian problem is putting the moderate rulers in the Islamic world on a confrontational course with their citizens.

This difficulty faced by many Arab governments, recently voiced by King Abdullah of Jordan, where governments with failed political and economic policies are treading on razor's edge to find a common ground between those clamouring for Western model of liberal democracy and market economy and those refusing modernity and trying to take the society back to its pristine sixth century roots.

While this struggle for the soul of Islam is raging in the Islamic world, the Bush administration has taken the lead for the atonement of Western guilt complex for the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis and centuries of injustice meted out to the Jews by the Christians by giving Israel a free hand in Palestine and now in Lebanon.

Consequently, writes columnist Roger Cohen, "whatever vestigial standing the US had as an honest broker in the Middle East has disappeared with the Bush administration's embrace of Israel's sustained use of force in response to Hezbollah's murderous July 12 cross border raid. Hezbollah equals terrorism, terrorism must be crushed, ruthlessness is the only way forward, and damn the consequences."

In the same vein, UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Brown also reportedly feels that given the discouraging US track record in the Middle East where the US is regarded as the second greatest enemy after Israel, US efforts to get through a resolution in the UNSC on the current Lebanese situation is unlikely to bear fruit.

Even Tony Blair has told the World Affairs Council at Los Angeles recently that the West is unlikely to win the battle against "global extremism" unless the war on terror is fought "at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world."

Basically Tony Blair has come around to Harvard Professor Joseph Nye's advocacy of "smart power" which is defined as a combination of hard power (military power and economic power) and soft power (culture, political values, and having moral authority) for resolution of conflicts. Nye explains that soft power rests on the ability to set the political agenda in a way that shapes the preference of the others. Though in the present day world of US nuclear primacy and her uncontestable military might it may sound academic, yet the argument advanced by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, that the only time in history the world had seen extended period of peace was when there was a balance of power, is profoundly meaningful.

"It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful," Nixon added "in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises." After the Second World War, President Truman could have created a great Roman empire (intervening in another polity without actually governing it) but preferred to establish the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions.

Fifty years later, another US administration, armed with the doctrine of pre-emption, is asking the international community to subordinate to its hard power the principles of the UN Charter (Article 1: Section 4, Article 2: Section 4, Articles 41, 42 and 51), principles VI and VII of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and Article VI of the US Constitution itself, all of which in spirit and letter hold the doctrine of pre-emption as a flagrant and unconscionable violation of law.

Despite its demonization by the Western media, Hezbollah is more Lebanese and nationalist now than at any time before. Hezbollah's leader Hasan Nasrallah has publicly announced his acceptance of stationing of a large number of Lebanese soldiers in southern Lebanon bordering Israel.

Now if the UNSC, particularly the US, were to ignore the Arab League and OIC demand that the proposed resolution should call for immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon, then one could argue that such a resolution, albeit not fully, is a repetition of Neville Chamberlain's 1938 Munich Pact acquiescing Adolph Hitler's annexation of the Sudetanland.

In sum, the primacy of force over international law and the UN Charter, if Israeli aggression against Lebanon is allowed to stand, will only help the al-Qaedists to recruit frustrated Muslim youth into their ranks who see their corrupt and oppressive rulers presiding over stagnant economies as impotent and establishment of a liberal order a distant dream.

More than any other thing, Americans by nature being happy in their isolation from global affairs, the shock defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Senatorial primary should wake up the Bush administration to the fact that the American electorates' honeymoon with the Bush administration Iraq policy is over and the administration's unqualified support to Israel on Lebanon may rouse the "irate moderates" to protest the futility of the pursuit of such a policy.

However unwarranted, the Bush administration would be well advised to listen to the European counsel for moderation and acknowledge that the men from Venus are indeed more adept in the art of compromise and conciliation than the men from Mars.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.