Over Her Head

So says Helen Thomas of Condi Rice in yesterday's opinion piece. Only problem is--in another case of incredibly poor timing--that events again conspire to leave the WH press corp's left-leaning "Crazy Aunt Marge" looking very bad:

Rice had orders from President George W. Bush to oppose any immediate ceasefire, which was hardly the proper policy by the U.S. if it wanted to end the suffering among Israelis and Lebanese.

Rice apparently was dispatched to the Middle East to pass on to Israel the message that it has the green light from the White House to do whatever it wanted and could take more time to clobber the rocket-firing Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, despite Lebanese and international pleas for a truce.

Israel took that message to heart, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems bent on proving that he can be as tough as his predecessors.

During her trip, Rice was snubbed by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who told her she was not welcome in Beirut if the U.S. did not support an immediate cessation of hostilities.

She was later blindsided in her personal visit with Olmert and other Israeli officials. During the meeting, the Israelis failed to alert Rice of their bombing massacre that day of Lebanese civilians in the village of Qana. The attack evoked worldwide indignation.

Rice was notified of the attack later by e-mail from a State Department staffer. After learning the news of Qana, Rice appeared shaken and stressed out. Perhaps the human dimension of a threadbare foreign policy finally hit home.

Rice is out of her league and seems to have little knowledge about the Middle East. Her expertise was always on the now-defunct Soviet Union and the Cold War.

If Helen's interpretation of events is accurate, it leaves us believing that Ms. Rice was an utter failure in her mission to promote a cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah. Helen's view, no doubt, made perfect sense on Thursday but it didn't survive Friday.

By the time her column finished delivery in papers all across the country, the situation had changed drastically under her feet; The UN has an agreement in place, one that Israel has agreed to in principle:

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Friday that calls for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, and authorizes the deployment of 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers to help Lebanese troops take control of south Lebanon as Israel withdraws. The draft, which had been proposed by the United States and France, offers the best chance yet for peace after more than four weeks of significant bloodshed. It was the first significant action by the Security Council, the most powerful U.N. body, to address a war that has killed more than 800 people, destroyed Lebanon's infrastructure and inflamed tensions across the Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert endorsed the resolution late Friday, after a day of dramatic day brinksmanship including a threat to expand the ground war in Lebanon. But Israeli officials said Israel would not halt fighting until Israel's Cabinet has approved the cease-fire deal in its weekly meeting Sunday.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora also assured Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that his country backed the resolution, a U.S. official said.

As to the resolution itself, it has garnered a mixed reaction on the right. Michael Rubin hates it:

The UN Resolution is a defeat for the war on terror. Israel lost, Iran won.
* An international force is just decoration, all the more so without Chapter VII. You can out whatever language you want in about robustness, but the international community looks for reasons to not take action, not for reasons to be efficient.
* The UN already demarcated the Israeli/Lebanon border. They found that Shabaa Farms was not part of Lebanon. That it is even referred to is a victory for Hizbullah.
* Embargoes don't work. Is the international force prepared to take over Lebanese customs at all points of entry?
* The resolution suggests a prisoner exchange, legitimizing the Hizbullah's hostage-taking.
* Hizbullah became the first Arab 'army' to hit Haifa since 1948.

Diplomats and politicians will try to spin, but it's hard to change the facts.

Captain Ed takes a different tack: Some have hailed this as a breakthrough, while others see it as an unmitigated disaster. The truth is that the proposal gives both sides something while attempting to find what everyone understands will be the eventual outcome of any protracted war, given the reluctance of Israel to attempt another twenty-year occupation of Lebanon.

And it holds an ace in the hole for Israel, which many seem to have missed.

John Podhoretz elaborates on that here: It's not a disaster, for this reason: The language of Paragraph 10, point 1, reads "Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations." This is not parallel language. Hezbollah must cease all attacks. Israel must only cease "offensive military operations." Since Israel itself defines its own action in South Lebanon as by definition defensive, not offensive, there's a lot of give here. Besides which, will Hezbollah really cease "all attacks"?

For myself, I'm disappointed. Not because I enjoy seeing innocent Lebanese suffer, rather because allowing Hizbollah any respite is a bad idea.

Anything that meaningfully addresses the issue at the Lebanese-Israeli border means that Hizbollah must be gone--destroyed as a 'military' force or made politically irrelevant, doesn't really matter which. I myself don't see how this agreement gets us there.

Meanwhile, back on Friday morning Helen argued that Rice had failed in accomplishing anything except giving Israel cover in continuing it's assault on helpless Lebanese civilians. She closed her column with more of the same 'Bushies get nothing right' rhetoric:

It will be a long time before America regains the great respect and reverence it once enjoyed among the peoples of the Middle East, before Bush's aggressive policies took hold, starting with his unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

The Iraqi war -- which Rice helped to pump up when she was Bush's national security adviser -- is one of her foreign policy failures. The failure of the U.S. to take steps to halt the current Israel-Hezbollah war is merely another sign that she's in over her head.

I wonder who she thinks she's kidding with the 'great respect and reverence it [America] once enjoyed among the peoples of the Middle East,' remark. Perhaps she's stuck in a time-warp but by my calculations we've been far from adored since at least the 1983 Marine-barracks bombing in Beirut.

Who's in over her head?

I've got a UN agreement 'to end the suffering among Israelis and Lebanese,' and a foreign-policy-fantasy argument that says Helen should have stuck with the White House gig or gone cold-turkey into retirement.