Murder of peacekeepers raises stakes in Lebanon

By Robert Fisk

"......The Spanish suffered severely for their support for George Bush in the Iraq war, and now, it seems they are paying the price for being part of an expanded UN army in the south of Lebanon, one which was put in place with the encouragement of George Bush and Tony Blair to secure Israel's northern border after last summer's conflict. It is an international army commanded by four Nato generals, and many Lebanese regard it as an extension of Nato rather than a UN peacekeeping mission......

.....But the Hizbollah has been at great pains to try to protect the new UN force because they fear that just such an attack as occurred yesterday will prompt the US to claim falsely that it was their organisation - which is supported by Iran - that was responsible. In fact, intelligence officers from the French, Spanish and Italian embassies met secretly with Hizbollah officials in Sidon more than three weeks ago to seek assurances that Hizbollah would do their best, as the local armed militia, to protect the international force. The Hizbollah men agreed that they would do their best, but warned that al-Qa'ida-type groups in the Sunni areas of northern Lebanon may well try to breach their security. We shall now find out if America believes this - and it is the truth - or whether Western governments decide to blame Iran by claiming Hizbollah was behind the bombing of the UN troops......

Lebanon therefore now descends into another, even more serious crisis involving not only their own semi-al-Qa'ida satellite groups, but Western armies as well. Whenever Nato has been involved in Lebanon in the past, it has always been attacked - most devastatingly when US Marines and French paratroopers were assaulted by suicide bombers in Beirut in 1982 at a cost of almost 300 lives. Scarcely an area of Lebanon has not been involved in violence in the past 12 months and each crisis has been worse than the previous crisis, so, as the Lebanese say, here we go again."