Give Siniora A Chance

There's an excellent New York Times Op-Ed today by Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and one of our favorite Arab leaders here at the Middle East Blog. In "Give the Arab Peace Initiative A Chance", Siniora points out that the Winograd Commission, an Israeli government committee that last week criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for badly mismanaging last summer's war in Lebanon, missed the opportunity to draw an important conclusion from the disaster: that military force will never make Israel safe. "The only way for the people of Israel and the Arab world to achieve stability and security is through a comprehensive peace settlement to the overarching Arab-Israeli conflict," he writes.

One striking thing about the piece, though, is that it never mentions the "H" word. Hizballah, Lebanon's anti-Israeli militia, started last summer's mess by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, and is now holding Siniora's government hostage with a protest campaign that's been going on for more than five months. The reason that Arab moderates like Siniora want peace so badly is that war threatens their countries on two fronts -- with Israel and with militants at home.

Israelis and pro-Israeli Americans often don't seem to realize that groups like Hizballah continue to be a potent force because many people in the Arab world see Israel as a real threat to their security. Some of these concerns are exaggerated. For example, except for a few goat herders, does anyone really care about Shebaa Farms, the patch of land in southern Lebanon currently occupied by Israel? Of course not. But Israel also keeps doing things that give Lebanese good reason to be scared. Israel has invaded Lebanon twice in the last 25 years and wreaked a lot of havoc in the years between. That's why Hizballah and other militant groups draw popular support.

With Hizballah and its supporters regularly accusing the Siniora people of being Zionist stooges, it's understandable that Siniora avoids the Hizballah issue in a call for peace with the Jewish State. But his peace manifesto does double duty not only as a call for a solution to the Arab-Israeli problem, but also as a subtle statement of what Lebanon needs to solve its own domestic problems.

Comprehensive peace is the only way to disarm Hizballah, the only way to convince enough Lebanese that an armed militia in their midst is a greater threat to their security than Israel. Comprehensive peace is also the only sustainable way to keep rogue actors like Syria from meddling in Lebanon's affairs in order to prolong conflicts for their own purposes. If Hizballah no longer gets weapons from Syria, it will no longer take orders from Damascus. True, there will always be hard-liners who want to keep their weapons and carry on fighting, but peace will drain the swap in which they swim, and a revived Lebanese political process will tackle through consensus what foreign intervention could only make worse.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Jerusalem