Lebanon: the diplomatic and strategic game

1. Israel in Indirect Conflict With Iran -- by Alain Frachon (from Le Monde)

Seen from Israel, the war against the Lebanese Hezbollah seems like the first fruits of an indirect - but fundamental - conflict with Iran. It is not only the response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the extremist Shiite militia; not only a battle to prevent the Party of God's militia men from continuing to fire their missiles onto the other side of the border; not only a determined test of force to reestablish, at the expense of the land of Cedars, a power of deterrence that the Israeli army deems it lost following the withdrawals from Lebanon (Spring 2000) and Gaza (summer 2005).

Behind the war declared on Hezbollah, there is a larger strategic objective: By striking a group the Israelis describe as Iran's armed appendage in the Middle East, Jerusalem intends to prohibit the Islamic Republic from imposing itself as a concerned party in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

That is the impression that emerges from a series of interviews with political officials and Israeli experts the Jerusalem government organized for European journalists. The message is sometimes formulated to answer the criticisms to which Israel is subject for the "disproportionality" of its response to the July 12 double kidnapping.

Do reprisals to Hezbollah's provocations justify the number of civilian deaths in Lebanon and the destruction of so much of the country's civilian infrastructure - roads, highways, service stations, power stations, factories, hundreds of buildings, the airport, etc.? The question is turned aside, eliciting the following response: The destruction in Lebanon must be appreciated by the measure of the real stakes. The argument is what it is.

More seriously, Ze'ev Schiff, one of the most respected military commentators in the country, wrote last week in the (center-left) daily newspaper Haaretz, "The battle underway in Lebanon will determine Iran's place in the Near East."

A defeat of Hezbollah (Party of God) is a defeat for its Iranian creator and protector. The Israelis know that the Party of God is a formation solidly anchored in Lebanese reality; they know that a majority of Shiites in Lebanon identify with Hezbollah. It will not disappear under attack.

But Israelis observe that Hezbollah, the ideology of which preaches the pure and simple disappearance of Israel, is intrinsically linked to the Islamic Republic. Hezbollah receives some 100 million dollars in military aid each year, including the most sophisticated equipment; its officers and militiamen are trained by a detachment of Guardians of the Iranian Revolution, openly located in east Lebanon; the missiles that assail Israeli villages come from Iran or Syria; a number of Lebanese Shiites pledge allegiance to the Supreme Guide of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

That Republic is not just any regime. It's a regime that wants to acquire nuclear weapons and the president of which, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, proclaims his desire to erase Israel from the map. In the Near East, history teaches that people generally do what they say, from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Ariel Sharon...

Star personality of Israeli political life, Foreign Affairs Minister Tzippi Livni, sees Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a spokesman for Iranian policies in the region. Tehran happily publicizes its objectives: rejection of any negotiated solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and consequently the desire to torpedo the least hint of one; conviction that Israel must one day disappear from the region; and, in consequence, that the creation of a Palestinian state on its borders reflects defeatism.

"There can be no question," says Mrs. Livni, of allowing revolutionary Iran and its allies in a new rejection front - Syria and the Palestinian Hamas - to become an ascendant power in the Near East. For the Israelis, that demands a defeat of Hezbollah - clear and clean, even if only partial - in the ongoing war in Lebanon.

Since the withdrawal of the Israeli Army in May 2000 to a borderline fixed by the UN, there have not been any points of contention between Lebanon and the Jewish state. So what was the point of the 17,000 missiles Hezbollah accumulated in Lebanon?

To assure, they say in Jerusalem, an Iranian military and political presence in the region. The Islamic Republic's presumed objectives: to exercise an influence on the Israeli-Arab conflict in a very specific manner; to retort against Israel for any attack on Iran.

A number of Arab states agree with Jerusalem's leaders. And, for the first time, they are saying so out loud. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and several Gulf states have publicly denounced the Party of God's irresponsibility in the July 12 double kidnappings.

And these countries also want Hezbollah not to emerge a victor in the new Lebanese war. But they run against the current of those they govern who are of an Arab public opinion broadly won over to the Party of God - a little more so with every bombardment of Lebanon, with every image of Lebanese civilians killed, wounded, terrorized.

Hassan Nasrallah is poised to become a hero of the Arab street, including the Palestinian territories - one of these messiahs like Nasser in the 1960s, then Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991 - regularly promising to revenge the "humiliation" of the Arabs and to rid the Palestinians of Israel, thereby reinforcing the illusions and the misfortune of the latter.

The popularity of Hezbollah's leader is not designed to reassure the elites of majority Sunni Arabs. In it, they see their fears of a climb-back to power by an Iran they had believed settled-down confirmed. Ahmadinejad's presidency sounds the wake-up call for this explosive mixture - ultra-nationalism and Shiite messianism - that fueled the Iranian revolution.

In Cairo, Riyadh and Amman, people fear the formation of a radical "Shiite crescent" that starts in Tehran and passes by way of Beirut (with Hezbollah) and Baghdad. The fall of Saddam Hussein freed a Shiite Iraqi power often close - very close - to the Iranian regime. The role this "Shiite crescent" will come to have is, in part, playing out in this umpteenth war in Lebanon.

Justified or not, this strategic analysis is one of the elements that will command a key decision from Israel: When to accept a cease-fire?


2. Israel Is Losing This War
Its leaders need to act fast.
BY BRET STEPHENS

Israel is losing this war.

This is not to say that it will lose the war, or that the war was unwinnable to start with. But if it keeps going as it is, Israel is headed for the greatest military humiliation in its history. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israelis were stunned by their early reversals against Egypt and Syria, yet they eked out a victory over these two powerfully armed, Soviet-backed adversaries in 20 days. The conflict with Hezbollah--a 15,000-man militia chiefly armed with World War II-era Katyusha rockets--is now in its 21st day. So far, Israel has nothing to show for its efforts: no enemy territory gained, no enemy leaders killed, no abatement in the missile barrage that has sent a million Israelis from their homes and workplaces.

Generally speaking, wars are lost either militarily or politically. Israel is losing both ways. Two weeks ago, Israeli officials boasted they had destroyed 50% of Hezbollah's military capabilities and needed just 10 to 14 days to finish the job. Two days ago, after a record 140 Katyushas landed on Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice he needed another 10 to 14 days. When the war began, Israeli officials spoke of "breaking" Hezbollah; next of evicting Hezbollah from the border area; then of "degrading" Hezbollah's capabilities; now of establishing an effective multinational force that can police the border. Israel's goals are becoming less ambitious while the time it needs to accomplish them is growing longer.

It is amazing how much can be squandered in the space of three weeks. On July 12, Israel sat behind an internationally recognized frontier, where it enjoyed a preponderance of military force. It had deterrence and legitimacy. Hezbollah's cross-border raid that day was widely condemned within Lebanon and among Arab leaders as heedless and provocative. Mr. Olmert's decision to respond with massive force enjoyed left-to-right political support. He also had a green light from the Bush administration, which has reasons of its own to want Hezbollah defanged and which assumed the Israelis were up to the job.

But it seems they are not up to the job. The war began with a string of intelligence failures: Israel had lowered its alert level on the northern border prior to the raid; it did not know that Hezbollah possessed Chinese-made antiship missiles, one of which nearly sank an Israeli missile boat off the coast of Beirut; it was caught off guard by the fierce resistance it encountered in the two Lebanese villages it has so far attempted to capture. Such failures are surprising and discouraging, given that Israel has been tracking and fighting Hezbollah for nearly a quarter-century.

Harder to understand is a military and political strategy that mistakenly assumes that Israel can take its time against Hezbollah. It cannot. Israel does not supply itself with precision-guided bombs; it does not provide its own cover at the U.N. Security Council; it does not have 130,000 troops at risk in Iraq of an uprising by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. It should be immensely worrying to Israel's leaders that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is calling for an immediate cease-fire. Ayatollah Sistani--unlike, say, Kofi Annan--is the sort of man who can get George W. Bush's ear.

Israelis have compounded that mistake with an airpower-based strategy that, whatever its virtues in keeping Israeli troops out of harm's way, was never going to evict Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, just as airpower alone did not evict Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The law of averages, however, guaranteed that over the course of 5,000 bombing sorties one bomb (or two or three or four) would go astray.

That may have been what happened over the weekend in Qana, where an Israeli air attack reportedly caused the deaths of at least 27 people, including 17 children. Yes, Hezbollah bears ultimate responsibility here for deliberately placing its military assets among civilians. Yet the death of those children should be counted as a crime if Israel's purposes in Lebanon are basically feckless. A line being bandied about in Israeli security circles is that the purpose of the bombing is to show Hezbollah that "the boss-man has gone berserk." What kind of goal is that? Nobody in this conflict ever doubted Israel's ability to set Lebanon back 20, 50 or 500 years (about where Hezbollah itself wants the country to be).

The goal, rather, is to ensure that Hezbollah will never again be in a position to spark a similar crisis, and to do so with maximum effect in the shortest possible time. Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz warned two weeks ago that Hezbollah wants a long war: "They realize that prolonged attrition causes internal pressure from Israeli citizens and international pressure, and think those are our weak points." That's right, which makes his three-week bombing campaign puzzling.

More puzzling was the Israeli cabinet's decision last week against launching a full-scale ground invasion. Instead, they will content themselves with a narrow security strip in southern Lebanon, one that is too narrow to prevent rocket fire from reaching Israel but will give Hezbollah a fresh excuse to fight the new "occupation." The cabinet also went out of its way to reassure Syria--a country Mr. Olmert listed in his own Axis of Evil only the week before--that it had no intention of dragging it into the conflict. But Israel need not have bombed Damascus to derive the benefit of keeping Bashar Assad awake at night, to guess what his patronage of Hezbollah will get him.

Last night in Tel Aviv, Mr. Olmert delivered another blood, tears, toil and sweat speech; the Israeli cabinet later approved a stepped-up ground war, the scope of which remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Ms. Rice left Jerusalem for Washington with a different idea: "I take with me an emerging consensus on what is necessary for both an urgent cease-fire and a lasting settlement. I am convinced we can achieve both this week."

Timelines are colliding here; agendas may follow. Israel has a prime minister who talks tough. What remains to be seen is whether he can act fast.

(Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays)


3. It takes forethought to end a war -- by Nehemia Shtrasler (from Haaretz)

There was one moment during the war when we had the upper hand. It was the moment when Israel had succeeded in striking Hezbollah with strong and surprising force, Haifa was peaceful and the number of casualties was small. That was the right moment to stop the war, declare victory and move on to the diplomatic track.

This opportunity came when the G-8 convened on July 14, two days after the fighting broke out. The G-8 formulated a four-point plan, and nothing could have been better for Israel. According to that plan, the three Israeli soldiers abducted to Gaza and Lebanon would be return unharmed, the Katyusha fire against Israel would stop, Israel would halt its military operations and pull back its forces, and it would also release the Hamas ministers and parliament members.

The G-8 statement declared that the full responsibility for the crisis fell on Hamas and Hezbollah and asked the UN Security Council to immediately formulate a program for the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559. The statement also called for the deployment of the Lebanese army in south Lebanon and suggested looking into the possibility of bringing an international force into the region. Israel and Lebanon were asked to launch diplomatic talks.

The international atmosphere was also pro-Israel, even among the hostile media. Israel received international legitimacy for its response to the killing and abduction of its soldiers inside its sovereign territory, and all the politicians, especially Ehud Olmert, were amazed at how much the world loved us.

But Olmert and Amir Peretz did not know when to quit. They wanted to show the public that they, the "civilians," were more courageous than their predecessors, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. That is why they continued the war in order to attain goals that from the outset were unattainable.

This does not mean that if Israel had adopted the G-8 proposal, the problem of Hezbollah would have been resolved. That would not have happened. That can only be resolved at the diplomatic level, with an Israeli-Syrian-Lebanese agreement. But at least it would have prevented us from deteriorating to the current situation, with its accompanying feeling of failure, the dead and the wounded, the attack on Israel's moral standing, the hatred toward it throughout the world and the damage to Israel's military deterrence.

Israel has not managed to crush Hezbollah, and worse, it has strengthened Hezbollah's standing in Lebanon and the Arab world, which is seeing how a tiny guerrilla organization has succeeded in standing up to the mighty Israel Defense Forces and causing Israel serious losses among its civilian population. That is a dangerous precedent.

The Olmert-Peretz plan was to shell and demolish south Lebanon and south Beirut until the Lebanese public demanded that its government vomit Hezbollah out from its midst. It appears that like a number of other Israeli leaders, they did not understand how much killing, poverty and distress people are willing to take, as long as their honor is not harmed, as long as they are not humiliated. And indeed, instead of demanding that Hezbollah be dismantled, the people of Lebanon want revenge, and they want it now. That is their response to the killing of 750 civilians and the destruction of thousands of homes, bridges, roads, villages and towns, putting Lebanon 20 years in the past.

Now, after the tragic events in Qana, which killed some 60 civilians, even Israel's greatest ally has changed direction and says it wants a speedy cease-fire. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has declared that Hezbollah's victory is the victory of the entire Lebanese people and that if Israel remains in south Lebanon, he will turn the Lebanese army against it. Siniora even spoke about a cease-fire without any agreement.

Other Lebanese, too - including some who are firm opponents of Hezbollah, such as Walid Jumblatt and Amin Gemayel - have also condemned Israel. Based on what has happened in the field, nothing remains of the grandiose goals of the beginning of the war.

Soon we will start to long for the excellent agreement offered by the G-8 at the beginning of the war. Today, it, too, is unattainable.


4. The king of fairyland will never grasp the realities of the Middle East
A US leader in his second term should have the power to rein in Israel. But George Bush is no ordinary president
By George Monbiot

Of all the curious things that have been written about Israel's assault on Lebanon, surely the oddest is contained in Paddy Ashdown's article on these pages last Saturday. "There is only one solution to this crisis, and it is the same solution we have to find in Iraq: to go for a wider Middle East settlement and to do it urgently. The US cannot do this. But Europe can."

The US cannot do this? What on earth does he mean? At first sight his contention seems plain wrong. While Israel intends to sustain its occupation of Palestinian territory, a wider settlement is impossible. It surely follows that the country that has the greatest potential leverage over Israel is the country with the greatest power to broker peace. Israel's foreign policy and military strategy is dependent on the approval of the United States.

Though Israel ranks 23rd on the global development index - above Greece, Singapore, Portugal and Brunei - it remains the world's largest recipient of US aid. The US government dispensed $11bn of civil foreign assistance in 2004. Of this, Israel received $555m; the three poorest nations on earth - Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and Niger - were given a total of $69m. More importantly, last year Israel also received $2.2bn of military aid.

It does not depend economically on this assistance. Its gross domestic product amounts to $155bn, and its military budget to $9.5bn. It manufactures many of its own weapons and buys components from all over the world, including - as the Guardian revealed last week - the United Kingdom. Rather, it depends upon it diplomatically. Most of the money given by the US foreign military financing programme - in common with all US aid disbursements - is spent in the United States. Israel uses it to obtain F-15 and F-16 jets; Apache, Cobra and Blackhawk helicopters; AGM, AIM and Patriot missiles, M-16 rifles, M-204 grenade launchers and M-2 machine guns. As the Prestwick scandal revealed, laser-guided bombs, even now, are being sent to Israel from the United States.

Many of these weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians and are being used in Lebanon today. The US arms export control act states that "no defence article or defence service shall be sold or leased by the United States government" unless its provision "will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace". Weapons may be sold "to friendly countries solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defence [or for] maintaining or restoring international peace and security".

By giving these weapons to Israel, the US government is, in effect, stating that all its military actions are being pursued in the cause of legitimate self-defence, American interests and world peace. The US also becomes morally complicit in Israel's murder of civilians. The diplomatic cover this provides is indispensable.

Since 1972 the US has used its veto in the UN security council on 40 occasions to prevent the passage of resolutions that sought either to defend the rights of the Palestinians or to condemn the excesses of Israel's government. This is a greater number of vetoes than all the other permanent members have deployed in the same period. The most recent instance, on July 13, was the squashing of a motion condemning both the Israeli assault on Gaza and the firing of rockets and abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian groups. Over the past few days, the United States, supported by Britain, has blocked all international attempts to introduce an immediate ceasefire, giving Israel the clear impression that it has a mandate to continue its assault on Lebanon.

It is plain to anyone - and this must include Paddy Ashdown - that Israel could not behave as it does without the diplomatic protection of the United States. If the US government announced that it would cease to offer military and diplomatic support if Israel refused to hand back the occupied territories, Israel would have to negotiate. The US government has power over that country. But can it be used?

A paper published in March by the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt documents the extraordinary influence the "Israel lobby" exercises in Washington. They argue that the combined forces of evangelical Christian groups and Jewish American organisations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee ensure that "Israel is virtually immune from criticism" in Congress and "also has significant leverage over the executive branch". Politicians who support the Israeli government are showered with funds, the paper contends, while those who contest it are cowed by letter-writing campaigns and vilification in the media. If all else fails, the"great silencer" is deployed: the charge of anti-semitism. Those who oppose the policies of the Israeli government are accused of hating Jews.

All this makes an even-handed policy difficult, but not impossible. Standing up to bullies is surely the key test of leadership. A US president in his second term is in a powerful position to demand that Israel pulls back and negotiates.

But if Ashdown meant that it is impossible psychologically and intellectually for the US government to act, he might have a point. At his press conference with Tony Blair last Friday, George Bush laid out his usual fairy tale about the conflict in the Middle East. "There's a lot of suffering in Lebanon," he explained, "because Hizbullah attacked Israel. There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy. There is suffering in Iraq because terrorists are trying to spread sectarian violence and stop the spread of democracy." The current conflict in Lebanon "started, out of the blue, with two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and rockets being fired across the border".

I agree that Hizbullah fired the first shots. But out of the blue? Israel's earlier occupation of southern Lebanon; its continued occupation of the Golan Heights; its occupation and partial settlement of the West Bank and gradual clearance of Jerusalem; its shelling of civilians, power plants, bridges and pipelines in Gaza; its beating and shooting of children; its imprisonment or assassination of Palestinian political leaders; its bulldozing of homes; its humiliating and often lethal checkpoints: all these are, in Bush's mind, either fictional or carry no political consequences. The same goes for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the constant threats Bush issues to Syria and Iran. There is only one set of agents at work - the terrorists - and their motivation arises autochthonously from the evil in their hearts.

Israel is not solely to blame for this crisis. The firing of rockets into its cities is an intolerable act of terrorism. But to understand why the people assaulting that country will not put down their arms, the king of fairyland would be forced to come to terms with the consequences of Israel's occupation of other people's lands and of its murder of civilians; of his own invasion of Iraq and of his failure, across the past six years, to treat the Palestinians fairly. And this he seems incapable of doing. Instead, his answers last Friday suggested, Bush is constructing a millenarian narrative of escalating conflict leading to the final triumph of freedom and democracy.

So I fear that Paddy Ashdown may be right. The United States cannot pursue a wider settlement in the Middle East, for it is led by a man who lives in a world of his own.

(www.monbiot.com)