Terms for a cease-fireApparently, Bush has finally stopped digesting that roast pig...ironies of ironies that he would want to talk about the one animal verboten in both religions to consume at a time when those two religions were facing off in what could end up being a world war, but Bush was never known as "Captain Tact."
BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS AND CRAIG GORDON
Newsday Washington Bureau
July 18, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Looking for a way to break the impasse over its air war with Lebanon, Israel offered tough conditions for a cease-fire that drew cautious support from the Bush administration.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in his first address to the Israeli parliament since the fighting began, said Israel would stop bombing Lebanon if the Lebanese militia Hezbollah freed two Israeli soldiers, pulled back from the border and stopped firing rockets into Israel.
Israeli diplomats said for the first time that Israel might temporarily drop its demand that Hezbollah's militia be dismantled, a condition that Olmert insisted upon last week.
"In the short term it may be possible to have a temporary cease-fire," one diplomat said. He said Israel now recognizes that the disarmament of Hezbollah as called for in a United Nations resolution "is not exactly realistic immediately."
After initially refusing to press Israel to stop firing on Lebanon, President George W. Bush's administration signaled yesterday that it was open to Olmert's idea of a cessation in hostilities and was willing to look at a proposal from Britain and the United Nations for the creation of some sort of security force along the Lebanese border.
I want to draw an analogy about this whole Israeli-Hezbollah-Hamas uprising: What Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza is very much akin to a father whipping his one son because his other son was caught smoking, but isn't around for his beating.
Exploring this a little further, we see that the son who gets beaten, completely innocent except for the fact that maybe he sort of suspected that his brother was smoking, learns nothing, except contempt for the authority that is beating him.
The son who smokes learns something, however: no matter how badly he behaves, he will never be the sole focus of the punishment for the crime. His brother will always suffer, right alongside him, and eventually (as misery loves company), begin to behave precisely as the father would wish he didn't.
Meanwhile, Grandpa George, who should be counseling his son, is off checking the barbecue....mmmmmmmmmm, that's good eatin'!
None of this in any way, shape, or form excuses the son who is causing the trouble, or the brother who should correctly be getting angry at this culprit. Thankfully, someone woke up and decided to try to stop the madness.
Bush
Israel
Lebanon
Gaza
Hezbollah
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