The Next Mideast War?

From Washington Post, May 3, 2007, by David Makovsky, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.....

.... the causes of last year's war still exist -- and may spark another conflagration.

The first underlying issue is the failure to enforce U.N. resolutions. Israel resorted to military action last July largely because the United Nations and the international community did nothing to implement U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 (passed in 2004) or Resolution 1680 (passed in 2006), which made clear that Hezbollah should disband and be disarmed. ...The end of the war led to the passage of Security Council Resolution 1701, which deployed thousands of U.N. peacekeepers to southern Lebanon. ...a key provision of the resolution -- an international embargo to prevent weaponry from entering Lebanon -- has not been met. ...arms from Syria are being smuggled into Lebanon, and ....Hezbollah is hiding Syrian-manufactured 220mm rockets just beyond the jurisdiction of the peacekeepers but within range of northern Israel. There is open speculation in Israel and Lebanon about the possibility of the conflict resuming this summer.

Two other factors add fuel to the fire. First, Syria is colluding with Hezbollah to destabilize the Lebanese government....

Second, in an eerie echo of the run-up to the 1967 war, U.S. and Israeli officials say Moscow is once again telling Damascus that Israel has plans to attack Syria. Israeli security officials say that Syria's new military deployments reflect this Russian advice. ...the prospects for miscalculation remain high....Syria sees its relationship with Iran and Hezbollah as a winning combination.

On top of all this, Hamas's approach to a cease-fire in Gaza is one of observation, not enforcement. Specifically, Hamas has done nothing to halt the firing of more than a thousand Qassam rockets from Gaza, which Israel evacuated from in 2005, into southern Israel over the past year, and last week it publicly asserted responsibility for some such attacks.....

Amid all these problems, and given Olmert's teetering position and the Arab League's insistence after its March summit in Riyadh that its peace plan is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, it is hard to believe that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will succeed in negotiating a "political horizon" -- namely, fleshing out guiding principles that would govern a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- until the Israeli political situation stabilizes and there is greater clarity about and a moderate direction to the Palestinian "unity government."

This situation does not argue for U.S. passivity. Rather, Rice should lead an international coalition to defuse multiple looming crises in Arab-Israeli arenas. The international community can and should agree to follow up U.N. Resolution 1701 with one involving the deployment of U.N. peacekeeping troops on the Syrian-Lebanese border. Avoiding another outbreak of violence could make Rice's political horizon a more likely possibility once the Israeli leadership crisis eases.