Rice and Christopher – Competing world views

The current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah demonstrates the past failures of the UN, and Warren Christopher type diplomatic solution to these problem.

In today’s Washington Post, Warren Christopher wrote a column explaining the folly of Secretary Rice’s “wrongly focused diplomacy.” He goes on to explain his “successes” in 1993 and 1996 dealing with, in general terms, the exact same problem. Both times a quick cease fire was called for and Syria was engaged diplomatically.  The fighting stopped- for a while. Yet here we are again. That template that has been used for dealing with this crisis has produced a temporary secession from major combat, but it does not change the entrenching, arming, and continued attacks by Hezbollah on Israel.

The template used by the two State departments of the Clinton administration for dealing with international crisis management produce only short term results if any. Christopher’s own article incriminates his own policy. We are now faced again with the exact problems that he so “successfully handled”. Let us not forget North Korea, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Rwanda. Each one of these was dealt with by the Clinton Administration, and yet all of these became bigger problems or so much time passed as to allow the issue to die (Rwanda where the genocide ran its course before any action took place).

I don’t pretend to know the answer to this whole problem, but I think it is time to try another path from the Christophers’ of the world.  Bush and Rice are allowing Israel to neutralize the threat. They want to push the stop button, not the pause button. Charles Krauthammer’s piece says it well. Read it here.

In response to the cease-fire now crowd – we already know what doesn’t work, lets try something else now.

This brings me to the UN. The recent bombing of a UN post in Southern Lebanon, reminded us of the efforts of UN to resolve this on going, repetitive conflict when they issued resolution 1559. The unarmed, military positions, like the one that was hit, were to report on violations of this resolution. This resolution was to result in the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon, disarming of Hezbollah and the elimination of the control of Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah. The only thing that was accomplished was the withdrawal of Lebanon by Israel. The arming of Hezbollah was significantly increased, and Hezbollah is now essentially a state within a state stronger politically and militarily than the government of Lebanon.

This is just one example of the incompetence of the UN. A few other examples are Rwanda, Somalia, and oft forgotten Oil-for-Food and Sex-for-Food scandals.

In fairness, the UN does a great job of supplying immunizations, rice and grain.

Keep these in mind the next time Annan, Christopher, or Albright indignantly lectures the US on how to operate our foreign policy.