Meanwhile, fighting continues in the mountains east and south of Beirut. There are reports of heavy fighting near Tripoli as well. Overall, the March 14th forces have been taking one hell of a beating. Abu Muqawama has been searching for comment on the fighting from some of March 14th's strongest supporters in Washington, and he accordingly read David Schenker's piece for the Washington Institute. David has been a resolute supporter of March 14th, but he is intellectually honest, and his assessment of U.S. policy options seems, to this blogger, quite accurate:
Regardless of what drove the timing of the standoff, it appears the government miscalculated. Sadly, for Washington, there are few realistic policy options to reverse the Hizballah coup. It is highly unlikely that the UN -- which failed to even prevent the rearming of Hizballah -- would agree to more dangerous deployments in Lebanon.David then pins his hopes on the Lebanese Army, but it seems to Abu Muqawama that, if anything, the Lebanese Army has sided with Hizbollah in the fighting. That is to say, they can obviously see Hizbollah is the strongest side and they've basically stayed out of it, happy to act as peace-keepers once the fighting has already reached some sort of conclusion but unwilling to step in between the two sides. Does this square with what everyone else is thinking, or no? ...
-- And "mo" from New Phoenicia in the comments section:
...They will continue to back a losing horse and rely on black ops, subterfuge and shenanigans hoping one of them pays off, not learning that on the ground Hizballah holds all the cards. This is the path of least resistance as those it will work with have a visceral hate of Hizballah and are easy to motivate into action. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is very rarely the path to the most gain...
No comments:
Post a Comment