Did Biden and Trump hatch the Lebanese ceasefire?

The partial good news today is that a 60-day ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon, began this morning at 4 a.m.

I call it partial good news because, if it holds, at least we will not see any more of our troops falling in battle in the north for a while. Sadly, that’s probably the only really good part of the agreement.

A look at the specifics of what is known about the agreement leaves most of us with hope for a better future, but not much confidence that things will work out that way.

For the moment, our forces will maintain their current positions in Lebanon, some of which have crossed north of the Litani River, 18 miles north of the border with Israel. They will withdraw in stages over the next weeks, as the Lebanese military begins to deploy in what is termed “Southern Lebanon.”

These Lebanese will be government troops presumably, not Hezbollah. The Lebanese troops will have the responsibility to verify that Hezbollah’s forces do not enter this zone. The details as to how this will be accomplished are not clear, and there is not a lot of confidence here that the effort will be successful. These same Lebanese troops will be charged with also making sure that any remaining Hezbollah infrastructure is removed.

The overall supervision of the area will be in accordance with the longstanding, but lightly observed, UN Resolution 1701, which had UNIFIL forces and the Lebanese army in charge of this 18-mile-deep buffer zone for the last 18 years. In the new framework, they will be augments by American and French monitors as well. Hopefully, the international presence in addition to UNIFIL will end with different results than the 2006 ceasefire agreement, where all the international players high-tailed it out of the region as soon as it was signed.

Of course, Israel’s actions over the past month have seriously weakened Hezbollah’s capabilities, destroyed its top level and second tier leadership, and caused a significant drop in their morale. Hopefully, that will make a difference as well.

While all of this give us hope, the 80,000 Israeli citizens living in the north of the country who have been out of their homes now for over a year will not be pacified by this agreement, nor will most of them be willing to return based on it. The destruction to physical property in the north during these last 14 months of daily rocket barrages from Lebanon has left the area in ruins, with many structures having to be rebuilt entirely. It is doubtful that a 60-day ceasefire with Hezbollah, still partially in place in Lebanon and still able to fire rockets at Israel, will give the residents the level of comfort and security that they need to move back and rebuild.

In addition, Israeli is rightfully retaining the right to reply to any movement by Hezbollah that even appears to violate the agreement. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before we will be back there once again.

At the end of the day, it will be nice to see our troops coming back safely and the rocket attacks stopping, and let’s hope it all leads to something more permanent than a 60-day ceasefire.

However, what it most interesting is how this is all came about and why now. To me, it is possible that the US elections created a perfect scenario for Biden and Trump each to get a win with a Lebanese ceasefire. Consider this:

1. Trump said during the campaign that he wanted the wars here to be over before the inauguration, but would end them on day one regardless.
2. Biden has been urging an end to the wars and would certainly like to claim that he accomplished that before the end of his term.
3. Although a lame-duck president, Biden does have leverage over Israel in that he controls the spigot of arms flow into the country.
4. Bibi admitted publicly on Israeli TV last night that we are running short on arms and need to resupply (not sure I would have announced it so that all our enemies now know it as well).
5. Bibi cannot say no to Biden, but he would not say no to Trump.

It is entirely conceivable that in the closed-door meeting between Trump and Biden two weeks ago that they hatched a plan to make this happen so that both of them could claim a success, knowing full well that each of them had different kinds of leverage with Bibi to get him to agree. Biden claims he ended the war with Lebanon and Trump claims he got it finished before he took office.

Farfetched? Perhaps, but we will probably never know the full truth and this all fits quite well together.

I would watch the next two months before the election very carefully and would not be surprised if we see a parallel scenario develop with Gaza as well. Politics makes strange bedfellows and nowhere more so than in the Middle East.