Not surprisingly, the most extreme statement came from Iran: A Middle East storm is brewing and will strike violently, said the radical Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The use of force in Lebanon could trigger a hurricane.”
He spoke after Riyadh released an official statement from King Abdullah asserting: “If the peace option fails because of Israeli arrogance, there will be no option but a war in the region.” The Saudi king was uncharacteristically unrestrained in his speech after seeing the US secretary come and go without allaying the Lebanese crisis.
At around the same time as the statement from Riyadh, huge explosions struck Hizballah targets in South Beirut for the first time since US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed in the Middle East for talks in Beirut, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Israeli positions along the Lebanese border also came under heavy Hizballah mortar fire on Tuesday afternoon, coinciding with an Israeli air bombardment of Hizballah rocket sites in Tyre. The IDF began closing some strategic roads to the Lebanese border to civilian traffic.
Hopes had been entertained In Cairo and Riyadh that the visiting US secretary would voice some sort of reproof for Israel’s extensive military action in Lebanon and apply the brakes in her private talks with Ehud Olmert. Instead, no sooner had she departed when Israeli defense minister Amir Peretz announced that Israel is clearing a security zone in South Lebanon that will remain under IDF fire control unless a multinational force assumes responsibility.
Given the enormous, time-consuming difficulties facing the assembly of such a force, his statement was taken as the first avowal of Israel’s intentions beyond the military operation. The term “security zone” was uttered for the first time since the Hizballah attack of July 12 sparked the current crisis.
Privately, the pro-Western rulers in Riyadh, Cairo and Amman were cheering Israel’s offensive in the hope of its crippling the extremist Shiite Hizballah and dealing Tehran its comeuppance. But Peretz’s statement gave Arab rulers the pretext for ignoring the fact that Israel was defending itself against attack and reviving their age-old accusations of Israeli ambitions to seize Arab lands with American support.
It was rumored in Cairo that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak plans to visit Syrian president Bashar Asad in Damascus this week to discuss the Lebanese crisis.
July 25, 2006, 11:56 PM (GMT+02:00)
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