Lebanon: fighting continues, Israel loses face, world looks on, peace when?

1. Now Comes The Next War
Before the war, half the Lebanese supported Hizbullah. Now more than 85 percent do.
By Rami G. Khouri (from Beirut’s Daily Star)

The Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbullah has battled Israel tenaciously for nearly a month, at horrendous cost to the people and infrastructure of Lebanon. Soon comes its next fight—a postwar political reckoning. Whether the party emerges from the current conflict weaker or stronger—and stronger seems the answer now—it will then have to battle the country's other political, religious and ethnic groups for the soul and identity of Lebanon.

This face-off will transcend borders, for it is a microcosm of the wider struggle in the Middle East. On one side is the American-led West and Israel, with some very quiet Arab allies; on the other is the movement to affirm an Arab-Iranian-Islamist identity. The ultimate contest will be the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program, followed by the ongoing tug of war over Hamas's democratic incumbency in the Palestinian territories. As for today's war, the Lebanon-Israel conflict will shape the contours of this emerging ideological battle in a variety of important ways.

Even now, the military clash is largely a political war of wills, deterrence and resistance, at least in Hizbullah's view. Holding out for a month and emerging to negotiate a ceasefire represents, to many, a considerable victory. Yet within Lebanon itself, the fighting has both accelerated and camouflaged deep political tensions. Many concern Hizbullah's true identity and ultimate intentions.

Before the war, just over half the Lebanese said they supported Hizbullah's role as an armed resistance group that deterred Israeli attacks. Two weeks after the fighting started, more than 85 percent of Lebanese in one poll said they supported Hizbullah's military attacks against Israel. This included 80 percent of Christians, a figure that was obviously inflated by anger against Israel for its savage attacks against all parts of Lebanon, not just Hizbullah strongholds in the south. But beneath this wartime rallying lurk deeper divisions, and much mistrust. Christians, especially, view the group as Iranian-backed hegemonic extremists. Many say it has brought destruction not only upon itself but the entire nation, and they are angry—even those who express support for the guerrillas. Some privately hope that the American-backed Israeli assault will defeat Hizbullah once and for all. With every bomb that has dropped around us in Beirut, I can feel this divide widening as Hizbullah's supporters grow more vocal—and its critics more bitter.

The war has also seriously damaged Lebanese confidence in the United States. The "March 14" anti-Syrian coalition of Christian, Sunni and Druze parties expected U.S. support to transform Lebanon into a truly democratic, sovereign and prosperous country. Instead, Washington's unqualified backing of Israel has pushed more Lebanese toward Hizbullah.

An alternative political alliance may emerge from the negotiations over a U.N. ceasefire. Hizbullah has accepted the seven-point plan to end the fighting put forward late last month by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. It incorporates Hizbullah's claims against Israel—involving, among other things, an exchange of prisoners and the return of occupied land—and theoretically opens the door to placing its arms under Lebanese government control.

But Hizbullah, as arbiter of a settlement, would likely emerge from these talks with far more clout than it went in with. Would it then try to flex its newfound muscles by dominating the domestic political scene and seeking more cabinet or parliamentary seats? Or, as some analysts who are intimately familiar with the party suggest, would it continue to leave national governance to a consensus cabinet in which it is only symbolically represented, while focusing its energy on defining Lebanon's overall political identity and strategic orientation? From Hizbullah's perspective, that would involve loosening traditional ties to the United States and France, and engaging more with the Arab-Islamic world. Critics also fear this would mean a renewed (even dominant) role for Syria in Lebanon—along with a greater Iranian say in Lebanon's foreign policy.

Hizbullah's secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has tried to allay such concerns, stating recently that a Hizbullah "victory" would be for all Lebanese, Arabs and Muslims, and not for Shiites only. In this respect, it was worth noting late last week that Nasrallah threatened to attack Tel Aviv in retaliation for Israeli attacks on largely Sunni and Christian central Beirut. He did not do so when the mostly Shiite areas of southern Beirut were being hit.

The very ferocity of the latest fighting may signal a waning of the military battle. The ensuing Lebanese political battle will soon begin. Watch closely, for as it goes, so goes the larger Middle East.

(Khouri is editor-at-large of the Daily Star in Beirut.)


2. The Real Estate War -- by Gideon Levy (from Israel's center-left Haaretz Daily)

This miserable war in Lebanon, which is just getting more and more complicated for no reason at all, was born in Israel's greed for land. Not that Israel is fighting this time to conquer more land, not at all, but ending the occupation could have prevented this unnecessary war. If Israel had returned the Golan Heights and signed a peace treaty with Syria in a timely fashion, presumably this war would not have broken out.

Peace with Syria would have guaranteed peace with Lebanon and peace with both would have prevented Hezbollah from fortifying on Israel's northern border. Peace with Syria would have also isolated Iran, Israel's true, dangerous enemy, and cut off Hezbollah from one of the two sources of its weapons and funding. It's so simple, and so removed from conventional Israeli thinking, which is subject to brainwashing.

For years, Israel has waged war against the Palestinians with the main motive of insistence on keeping the occupied territories. If not for the settlement enterprise, Israel would have long since retreated from the occupied territories and the struggle's engine would have been significant neutralized. Not that a non-occupying Israel would have turned into the darling of the Arab world, but the destructive fire aimed at Israel would have significantly lessened, and those who continued to fight Israel would have found themselves isolated.

The war against the Palestinians is therefore unequivocally a territorial war, a war for the settlements. In other words, in the West Bank and Gaza, people were killed and are getting killed because of our greed for land. From Golda Meir to Ehud Olmert, the lie has held that the war with the Palestinians is an existential one for survival imposed on Israel when it is actually a war for real estate, one dunam after another, that does not belong to us.

The situation is different with Syria. For 33 years, the Syrians gave up the military effort to reinstate their occupied lands. Israel can pass a dozen Golan Heights laws to annex it, but occupied territory remains occupied territory. During those three decades, the prevailing view in Israel was that there was no need for peace with Syria: The Syrians sat quietly anyway, so why give them back the Golan?

This is the same dangerously foolish thinking that characterized the first 20 years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians sat quietly, surrendered under the Israeli occupation boot, and it did not occur to anyone to return their territory. Instead, Israel established the settlements. Only when the Palestinians woke up and realized they were going to lose their lands forever did they begin a violent campaign; and only after blood was spilled, did Israel wake up from its dreams and realize that it could not hold onto all of the territories forever. Thus, with regrettable delay and years of bloodshed, the recognition of the PLO, the Oslo accords, the disengagement and the convergence were born - all partial and fake solutions meant to postpone the end of the occupation.

We did not need all of that with the Syrians - after all, they sat quietly all of these years. Now comes the war in Lebanon and proves that this was a mistake. Although the Syrians sat on the sidelines, the danger from that direction was not removed and the delusion that the Golan would forever remain in Israeli hands, without our being asked to pay for its occupation, is now slapping us in the face.

But the current war could yet turn out to be only an appetizer for the coming wars, which will be far more dangerous. The saying that time is on our side is another delusion. The Arab and Muslim world has armed, in all of this time, and the danger of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is already hovering over our heads. The only response to that is maximum neutralization of the flashpoints, before the bomb arrives. But Israel has chosen to close its eyes and build its future on a horrifyingly temporary quiet, or on more and more war operations.

Just when territory is losing its military importance because of the development of new fighting technology, Israel is using security excuses to stay in the territories. Former-prime minister Ehud Barak criminally missed the opportunity to sign a peace treaty with Syria after he got "cold feet," as witnesses said, and retreated at the last minute. That's how it works with us. When the other side is quiet, why return territories? And when they do go to war, "there's nobody to talk to," and certainly not while we are "under fire."

While we are ready to jump on any war bandwagon, as in this time, we endlessly procrastinate when it comes to peace negotiations. Now, too, when Syria, pushed around by the U.S., desperately wants to return to the "family of nations," is an excellent time to try to make peace with it - but there are those who say now is not the time. What will the Americans say? They, after all, are against any deals with Bashar Assad of "the axis of evil."

So, there it is, another excuse to miss a golden opportunity, another mendacious excuse. As in the case of the peace with Egypt, the move that has guaranteed Israel's security for years far more than any war, and which was put together behind the America's back, America would not be able to oppose a peace agreement with Syria. Now, after we've hit Hezbollah and ruined Lebanon, the prime minister of Israel should declare: the Golan for peace. That could contribute a lot more to our security than a thousand useless daring operations in Baalbek, but it would take a lot more courage than going off to fight another unnecessary and useless war.


3. The War has Backfired for Israel, and Its Old Lebanese Curse Keeps Getting Worse
Most citizens in Lebanon now back Hezbollah
By Eric Margolis

Last week, Doron Rosenblum, a columnist for what I consider Israel's finest newspaper, Ha'aretz, delivered a zinger I doubt anyone would dare print in North America, where most Mideast news is heavily slanted.

The real cause of the latest Lebanon war, wrote Rosenblum, was not the seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, but an earlier, boastful TV speech by Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, that provoked Israel's leaders.

Nasrallah taunted Israel's new triumvirate of PM Ehud Olmert, Defence Minister Amir Peretz, and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, sneering they were "small" compared to Ariel Sharon. "Adding fuel to the fire," said Rosenblum, Nasrallah "emphasized the 'small' with his fingers."

According to Rosenblum, "bad-tempered" Olmert, Peretz, and "arrogant Halutz" flew into rages at this grave insult to their manhood, and sought to prove they could out-Sharon Sharon by turning a minor skirmish into an all-out war.

Sounds bizarre, but remember, George Bush Sr. invaded Panama after Manuel Noriega called him as a "wimp." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after its crown prince suggested Iraq's war widows be sent to Kuwaiti harems. Adolescent behaviour springs eternal.

Israel's old Lebanese curse just keeps getting worse.

A number of press agencies have reported the skirmish that triggered this war didn't actually occur in Israel but just inside Lebanon. If true, this would sink Israel deeper into the hole it has already dug itself after laying waste to much of Lebanon and killing dozens of civilians at Qana (with a U.S.-supplied missile).

Israel first said it was targeting missile launchers firing from Qana. But Israel's military now admits there were no rockets being fired from Qana the day of the attack. A decade ago, Israeli artillery killed 106 civilians there.

Political disaster

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter says that while it's "unarguable" Israel has every right to defend itself, Israel's savaging of Lebanon is "inhuman and counterproductive." He echoes world opinion.

One of Israel's finest thinkers, Uri Avnery, says Olmert and Peretz don't know what they've unleashed: "They are not running the war, the war is running them." Like U.S. President George Bush in Iraq, their generals promised them a cakewalk and instead produced a human, political and military disaster.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looked even more pathetic than usual after proclaiming a temporary humanitarian ceasefire in Lebanon -- which Israel promptly ignored. She deserves to be fired.

Like well-trained seals, the entire U.S. Senate and all but eight of 435 congressmen voted full support for Israel's war.

Israel may dominate Washington, but is having a far tougher time with Lebanon. In a little Thermopylae, Hezbollah's 3,000 fighters astoundingly held off Israel's mighty military machine, the world's fourth strongest, for three weeks. Many Israelis are now questioning the invasion's logic and objective.

Israel's latest plan: Occupy and depopulate a 20-mile deep chunk of Lebanon to the Litani River until an international force comes in and subdues what's left of Hezbollah. But few nations will send troops without prior agreement with Hezbollah. Israel battled Hezbollah for 18 years, losing nearly 800 men, and ultimately lost the war it began.

The deeper Israel advances into Lebanon, the more its troops are exposed to Hezbollah attack. Bombing and shelling won't defeat Hezbollah, which represents a third of Lebanon's people and is its de facto army. Some 87% of Lebanese now back Hezbollah. So far, the war has backfired for Israel.

Israeli operations are edging dangerously close to Syria. Damascus may be reluctantly forced into the war in spite of its obsolete armed forces. That's fine with Bush who would no doubt like to use Israel as a proxy against Iran's allies, sparing U.S. casualties before November's elections.

Tiny Lebanon has been shattered, with billions in damage. Continuing the war may turn ruined Lebanon into a chaotic, anarchic failed state and an incubator for more anti-Western, anti-Israeli extremist groups.

Those who destroy Lebanon will have to deal with its ugly consequences.


4. The Beginning of the End of the Adventure – by DAVID RIEFF

Until the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah broke out on July 12, the foreign policy pursued by the Bush administration in its second term was a source of increasing consternation to those who had most fervently supported its aspirations to rid the world of evildoers — that is, the thinkers and policy analysts identified with muscular neoconservatism. Writing in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, the magazine’s editor, accused the administration of pursuing policies that had allowed North Korea to test missiles with impunity and that had left the regime in Tehran “sitting pretty” — in short, of pursuing a “Clintonian” foreign policy, which is about as severe a condemnation as any upstanding neoconservative can deploy. For her part, Danielle Pletka, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute, recently told an interviewer, “I don’t have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or in any part of the conservative foreign-policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration.”

But Hezbollah’s decision to break the de facto truce that it had maintained since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the subsequent Israeli onslaught, seems to have halted, at least for now, this maelstrom of criticism from the conservative advocates of a transformational foreign policy. Instead, it appears as if the analysts and pundits grouped around magazines like The Weekly Standard, and on such increasingly influential blogs as Power Line, are doing everything in their rhetorical power to urge the White House to return to the verities of regime change it espoused in the aftermath of 9/11 and settle accounts with the regimes in Syria and Iran that not only are backing Hezbollah, but, in the minds of neoconservatives at least, are also at the root of the problem in Iraq as well. Kristol summarized this position well when he wrote that “while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States … This is our war, too.” He added, controversially, that it was time to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” he demanded.

The idea that America has a special responsibility to combat tyranny around the globe has been a bipartisan assumption at least since the Truman administration. But in recent years, conservatives have been the most ardent proponents of aggressive regime change — witness their support for aiding the Nicaraguan contras and Jonas Savimbi’s Angolan guerrillas in the 1980’s. Today many conservative thinkers regard the Bush doctrine as the reiteration of the Reagan doctrine and take it as their sacred responsibility to promulgate such holy writ. But will their bellicose hopes be dashed in the coming weeks — as, historically, the hopes of the American right in Republican presidents so often have been (consider the Eisenhower administration’s indifference to the Hungarian revolution in 1956, or the right-to-life movement’s disenchantment with Ronald Reagan)?

There is a better-than-even chance that they will be. After all, despite what some of its spokesmen said at the start of the conflict, Israel is looking less and less willing to expend the blood and treasure necessary to deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah. The costs are just too high. America’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, may insist publicly that there can be no negotiating with a terrorist organization like Hezbollah, but his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sent the opposite message when, during her lightning visit to Beirut in late July, she met with Nabih Berri, the Shiite speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and Hezbollah’s unofficial interlocutor with Western governments. It is one thing for President Bush to present Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah as part of the wider global war on terrorism and quite another to open another front in that war when the fate of Iraq hangs in the balance and American commanders are faced with the necessity of committing more troops to what even the U.S. military is now beginning to characterize, rather desperately, as the battle for Baghdad.

Neoconservatives still speak confidently of the moral clarity of America’s agenda in the Middle East, but after more than three years of war in Iraq, this moral clarity is all but gone as far as the American people are concerned: according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, half of the public thinks that whether we stay in Iraq a few more years makes “no difference” to America’s security. It is highly unlikely that this same public could be persuaded of the urgency of another war in the Middle East, another war on evil that will transform the region for the better. The president’s own party may need persuading as well: anyone doubting this need only look at how many Republican officeholders are putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the war in Iraq as they seek re-election in the fall. Airstrikes against Syria and Iran may be contemplated by both American and Israeli war planners, but a boots-on-the-ground war is a nonstarter for both Jerusalem and Washington, and bombing alone cannot produce regime change.

By allowing Israel to continue its harsh bombing campaign in Lebanon for weeks, the administration could have things both ways: practice a policy of restraint and lend its support to an ambitious scheme for regional transformation. But sooner or later, the U.S. is likely to put its weight behind some sort of compromise and cease-fire. Hawks within the administration may be calling for boldness, but Iraq gave boldness a bad name. That war has exhausted all of us, the Bush administration and the American public alike, and exhaustion breeds caution. There are worse ways to look at the world.

(David Rieff is a contributing writer for the NY Times magazine.)


5. Hezbollah and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Can game theory solve the Israel-Lebanon war?
By Tim Harford

Israel's strategy for dealing with Hezbollah has been called "tenfold deterrence": Any attack will be met with a far more forceful counterattack. Unfortunately both for Israelis and Lebanese, the strategy did not deter Hezbollah's missiles.

It might seem strange for an economist to offer even these obvious opinions on military strategy, but economists have been armchair generals since the development in the 1940s of game theory by John Von Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern , an economist. Game theory is the study of situations in which each side's actions influence and are influenced by the other side's actions. Since the Second World War, game theorists have pondered strategy, deterrence, and Armageddon.

Game theory's power to summarize complex situations in a simple model is sometimes too seductive. The two most overinterpreted ideas in game theory are related to deterrence: the prisoner's dilemma and the strategy sometimes believed to "solve" the dilemma, " tit for tat ."

The prisoner's dilemma was popularized by a simple story. Two men are captured by the police and separately offered the same plea-bargain: "If you confess and he doesn't, you walk free; if you both confess, you'll both get five years; if neither of you confess, you'll both get one year; if he confesses and you don't, you'll get 20 years." Rational prisoners will confess, wishing there was a way to commit each other to silence. Game theorists have known since the 1950s that when the prisoner's dilemma is repeated indefinitely, more cooperative strategies can flourish. This insight was independently rediscovered and made famous by Robert Axelrod , a political scientist who organized a computerized tournament in which competitors submitted simple programs to play the prisoner's dilemma. The champion was "tit for tat," which begins by cooperating with its fellow prisoner (staying silent) but punishes a squealer by confessing on the next turn. Axelrod argued that "tit for tat" was successful because it was easy to interpret, hard to exploit, began cooperatively, and quickly forgave transgressions by returning to cooperation. It has proved a magical myth: that you should speak softly and carry a big stick, that "an eye for an eye" can produce cooperation in unpromising situations. Axelrod's idea was repeated in a horde of popular science books.

But "tit for tat" is just a little too much of a poster child. The repeated prisoner's dilemma is a poor description of real-world situations. It didn't describe the Cold War, when a nuclear exchange was a one-off game if ever there was one. It doesn't describe the asymmetric struggle between Israel on one hand and multiple decision makers—Lebanon? Hezbollah?—on the other.

Most important, the "prisoner's dilemma" is merely a two-player game. Game theorists such as Ken Binmore , a professor at University College London, say this is a crucial omission. Most social arrangements stand or fail with the help of third parties. The crisis in Lebanon will be no exception.

In any case, "tit for tat" is not quite as successful as conventional wisdom would have you believe. A team from Southampton University kicked "tit for tat" off the top spot in a rerun of Axelrod's tournament by entering a collection of team players who colluded with each other. Another successful strategy is "tat for tit," which first tries to exploit the other person and plays nicely only if that doesn't work. Another winning approach is even more depressing, punishing cheats with eternal vengeance.

It is known simply as "grim."