Interventions Read Free Page A

durable peace. I knew I had annoyed at least one of the leaders there by asking Russian president Vladimir Putin to change the agenda and allow me to address the key session of the summit. As Bush and I engaged in a charged and pointed debate about my argument in front of the other leaders—with only France’s president Jacques Chirac joining in at the very end of the session—it was clear that Bush saw this as a simple matter of good versus evil. He was blunter still with Blair. “What about Kofi?” Bush had continued, according to the transcript. “I don’t like his cease-fire plan . . . His attitude is basically cease fire and everything sorts out . . . What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s all over . . . I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.”
    Now I wish that I—or anyone—could simply “make something happen” with just a phone call. And while the U.S. policy of isolating Syria meant that I was one of few global leaders communicating with the Syrian leadership, getting a solution would take more than just a conversation. Given the complex set of interests and motivations in Syria—and among its neighbors, including Israel—this was a three-dimensional chess game played between the wiliest and most mutually distrustful of powers.
    In fact, the Lebanon war was not just a wrenching tragedy for the Lebanese and Israelis. It was—in its tangled and bloody roots, its complex regional character, and its carefully UN-negotiated conclusion—a reflection of those forces of global order and disorder that I had been wrestling with throughout my decade as UN secretary-general. Intervention in long-standing conflicts; the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty; the role of peacekeeping; the place of the UN in the era of American dominance; the emergence of nonstate actors engaged in asymmetric conflict; the personal shuttle-diplomacy of a UN secretary-general in a fragmenting world—each of these was at stake in the Lebanon war. A simple battle between good and evil it was not.
    For Blair, however, this conflict—no less than Iraq—was refracted through his lens of a meta-conflict between modernity and the medieval, between tolerant secularism and radical Islam. We had met privately in St. Petersburg before the formal summit session, and when I told him that the G8 statement had been too weak and too vague to make any difference on the ground, he replied coolly that the question was not whether Israel could be convinced to cease fire today, but rather in “ten days or two weeks.” Two weeks? I gave him an astonished look. His only response was that the conditions for a cessation of hostilities were not yet in place. This was not the Blair with whom I had agreed so passionately about the moral necessity of a humanitarian intervention to halt the Serbian attacks on the Kosovar Albanians in 1999—a stand that compelled me to override my own commitment to Security Council authorization of the use of force, and which cost me greatly with major powers, including Russia and China. Something had changed in Blair, and with it, I felt, his ability to act as a credible mediator in this conflict.
    I was concerned with the scale and scope of Israel’s retaliation from the outset. Of course, the Israelis were justified in responding. Any nation, when attacked, has a right to defend itself. Israeli positions had been raided across an internationally recognized border. And I had personally certified the Blue Line in 2000 after working closely with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to enable his withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon after an eighteen-year occupation. But Israel’s justified defense of its borders rapidly became about something far greater, and far more difficult to achieve—namely, the destruction