The Provocation Continues........

Once again, the UN has called for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon and an end to the senseless murder being committed by both sides. However, despite continued calls from the international body, there is a reluctance to call for such a ceasefire by both America and the UK. Once more, the UN is made impotent by the actions of these two governments. If, as John Bolton claims, the UN is a waste of space, we are more than aware of who is responsible. The refusal to back these calls after the bombing of a UN base, in which four UN workers died, is an absolute disgrace. There is no option but to call for a ceasefire, and they stand alone in their refusal to do so. Of course, this may have to do with a longer term strategy being plotted in Washington and London.

There is no doubt whatsoever what the real strategy is in the Middle East. With the ongoing nuclear debate with Iran, the US and UK know that they can only justify military action if they can provoke Iran. We all know that they have been preparing for such a battle for some time now. Links have already been made between Hezbollah and Al-Qaida (despite their huge differences - I'll come to those later) and, by extension, Iran and Al-Qaida. This is all part of a concerted effort to implicate Iran in terrorist activity throughout the globe by linking them in with 'known terrorist organisations'. Of course, the likelihood of such a union is remote in the extreme and only really believable if you fail to understand the Islamic faith.

Al-Qaida is an 'organisation' (as the US and UK would have us believe, I think it is more likely an unorganised grouping around an ideological objective) that is headed by devoted Sunni muslims. Iran is, however, a Shi'a dominated society. There is a very great ideological difference between the two groups that has never yet been reconciled. In Iran for example, Sunni muslims are treated like second class citizens. The Sunni faith does not even a mosque in which to worship in Tehran. Furthermore, in a rare public protest, eighteen Sunni parliamentarians wrote to the authorities in July 2003 to criticize the treatment of the Sunni Muslim community and the refusal to allow construction of a mosque in Tehran that would serve that community. This persecution also manifested itself in the destruction of a newly constructed Sunni mosque in Sanandaj by a mob of Shi'a zealots in 2003.

As well as the differences in Iran itself, Hezbollah has also sought to distance itself from the Sunni run Al-Qaida. Nasrallah has condemned actions by Al-Qaida as recently as July 2006:

"What do the people who worked in those two [World Trade Center] towers, along with thousands of employees, women and men, have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East? Or the war that Mr. George Bush may wage on people in the Islamic world? Therefore we condemned this act -- and any similar act we condemn."

Furthermore, in April, an Al-Qaeda cell in Lebanon attempted to assassinate him. And he has even been condemned in the past by Al-Qaida's representative in Iraq as an 'enemy of the Sunnis.' Of course, this makes no difference to the efforts of the Western powers in linking the three groups together. The lack of understanding by those in the West, will allow those in power to continue to link these disparate groups for the convenience of their motives in the region. As the war in Iraq proved, facts mean nothing in the battle to convince the populace of the need to go to war. Particularly with elections in the offing.