BY PAUL PEDERSON  
With the arrival of 500 Spanish soldiers and an additional 200 French troops by September 15, the imperialist military force in southern Lebanon under the United Nations flag reached 4,600.

That growing force, along with thousands of Lebanese troops, is charged under the August 11 UN-brokered cease-fire agreement that ended the Israeli assault on Lebanon, with protecting Israel’s northern border and preventing Hezbollah from rebuilding its military infrastructure in the area.

A number of voices in the big-business press are now praising the outcome of Israel’s monthlong war.

In an opinion piece in the September 13 New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman said the UN military force policing southern Lebanon presents “a new model for peacemaking.”

Friedman called the model “land for NATO”—describing the UN-run force in Lebanon as “UN on the outside but NATO on the inside.” Now, Friedman said, “Hezbollah will not be able to directly attack Israel without getting embroiled in a conflict with 15,000 French, Italian, Indian, and possibly Turkish peacekeepers. That is a big new strategic problem for Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.” A similar strategy could be employed along Israel’s borders with the Palestinian territories as Israeli forces withdraw, he said.

A bourgeois party based in the Shiite population of Lebanon, Hezbollah—the “Party of God”—was the primary target of Israel’s military assault. The group, which calls for the establishment of an Islamic Republic modeled on Tehran, had been the dominant military authority in southern Lebanon until the cease-fire.

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, made it clear in a September 17 interview with the Washington Post that Tel Aviv will direct its next assault on Lebanon’s government rather than Hezbollah if the UN “peacekeepers” don’t do their job.

“We are going to face a state which does not implement its responsibility or maybe does not exercise its sovereignty,” Livni said. “And so in French they say tant pis,” which the Post translated as “too bad.”

“We could have done Lebanon in a few days, I think, if we had decided to attack Lebanon as a state,” Livni said.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is facing a continued barrage of criticism from a substantial section of the armed forces for its handling of the war. Moshe Ya’alon, the former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff who is now positioning himself for a political career, joined the chorus, calling for the resignation of the prime minister, defense minister, and current military chief of staff.

In an interview published in the September 14 Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Ya’alon said the final ground offensive of the war, in which 33 Israeli soldiers died, was conducted simply to give the appearance of a military victory.

“It had no substantive security-political goal, only a spin goal. You don’t send soldiers to carry out a futile mission after the political outcome has already been set,” Ya’alon said, referring to the UN cease-fire negotiations.

“Instead of coordinating with the Americans for them to stop us when the operation was at its height, and setting in motion a political process to disarm Hezbollah, we asked the Americans for more time,” Ya’alon said. “We let the Americans think that we have some sort of gimmick that will vanquish Hezbollah militarily.”

Ya’alon made his name for leading a brutal campaign of assassinations and assaults in the occupied Palestinian territories after taking the top military post in 2002. He described his task at the time as “chemotherapy” for the “cancer,” which he said the Palestinian national struggle represents to the existence of the state of Israel.  
 
 
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