Lebanon: lesson one – you don’t win a war just because you've got a stronger army

1. The Futility of Force
Senior army officers have begun to accept that military power might never win a war again
By Richard Norton-Taylor

Israel is learning a lesson that the armies of other countries, including the US, have already grasped. Military force can no longer guarantee victory, certainly not in the conflict Israel and its western allies say they are engaged in - the "war on terror," as the Bush White House calls it, or the "long war," as the Pentagon now prefers.

Whether you call them guerrillas, insurgents, or terrorists, you cannot bomb them into submission, as the US has found to its cost in Iraq, and as Israel is discovering in Lebanon. Even Tony Blair appeared to admit this in his weekend speech to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp organization. "My concern is that we cannot win this struggle by military means or security measures alone, or even principally by them," he said. "We have to put our ideas up against theirs."

He was reflecting what his military and defense officials have been saying for a long time. Last September serving army officers applauded Colonel Tim Collins, who commanded the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment in the invasion of Iraq, at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He said: "We have clearly no plan ... We are relying entirely ... on military muscle to impose freedom and democracy." Desmond Bowen, the policy director at the Ministry of Defense, told a conference at the Royal United Services Institute last month: "No longer does the singular strand of military activity lead to success."

General Sir Rupert Smith, who was NATO deputy supreme commander and commander of UN forces in Bosnia, spells out the limitations of military power in his book The Utility of Force . "We are engaging in conflict for objectives that do not lead to a resolution of the matter directly by force of arms, since at all but the most basic tactical level our objectives tend to concern the intentions of the people and their leaders rather than territory or forces."

Senior officers in the British army are wondering whether they will ever again fight a war, let alone win one, in the conventional sense. For them, the phrase "war on terror" is a misnomer, one that elevates the enemy and suggests terrorist groups can be defeated by force of arms alone.

Before the attacks of September 11 2001 on New York and Washington, the MoD had published a paper entitled "The Future Strategic Context for Defense." No conventional military threats to Britain were likely to emerge, it predicted, in the 30 years to 2030. Instead, it identified terrorism, along with international crime. Prompted by the experiences of the military in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s (which are far from settled), the MoD, in a further attempt to drive home the military's limitations, decided to develop what it calls a "comprehensive approach." In this century, it says in a paper ordered by the chiefs of staff, "the symptoms of crisis will be spawned by a combination of climate change, ideology, greed, ethnic animosity, residual territorial claims, religious fanaticism, and competition for resources."

Military force is no answer to these. What is needed is a "clearer understanding of the root causes" of potential (and actual) conflicts. Revealing the MoD's liking for acronyms, the paper says there should be more cooperation with OGDs (other government departments), NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and IOs (international organizations).

The British general who knows this best is David Richards, who yesterday took command of an expanded NATO force in Afghanistan. He knows he is engaged in a battle for "hearts and minds," a task that requires political and civil institutions, diplomacy, and negotiations, not the barrel of a gun or a bomb from a warplane. Afghanistan is an unprecedented test for the military, and the member governments, of the world's most powerful alliance.

(Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor. Email to: richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk)


2. Limits of Israel's high-tech power
Civilian deaths and surprisingly high troop casualties expose the drawbacks of Israel's technological advantage.
By Joshua Mitnick | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
PALMACHIM AIR BASE, ISRAEL

When Israel started its offensive against Hizbullah militants in Lebanon more than two weeks ago, it hoped its high-tech military hardware would quickly decimate the Iranian-backed militiamen with their low-tech arms.

But what began as a bid to swiftly rout the guerrillas with sophisticated air strikes has become bogged down in the hamlets of southern Lebanon, where Israeli ground troops are suffering a surprising number of casualties and where the air force killed some 60 civilians Sunday. Recent infantry losses and mounting civilian deaths are a reminder of the limits of Israel's technological advantage.

More decisive results from Israel's battle technology "would have been considered a major success. It seems that it wasn't nearly as successful as hoped,'' says Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv. "When you have an asymmetric war and when you have a terrorist group that uses human shields extensively, no technology is going to tell you that there are dozens of children in a basement of a building that is either used to store arms or next to missile launchers.''

How drones work

Outfitted with gadgets ranging from smart bombs to GPS equipment, Israel's army relies on no technology more heavily than the unmanned aerial vehicles in the Air Force's 200th Squadron.

Flown from a seaside air base just a few miles south of Tel Aviv, the drones scour the ravines and villages in southern Lebanon to take out rocket launchers before Hizbullah militants can launch Katyusha missiles into northern Israel.

Amid idyllic sunsets, three-man drone crews sit in windowless metal sheds outfitted with flat-screen computer panels, and a joystick that controls the camera.

The 19-foot-long Israeli-made Searcher II drone can stay airborne for more than 15 hours, and has a range of about 120 miles. Communicating over radio frequencies, the camera that gives Israeli soldiers a close-up of their targets transfers images back to a flight crew at the base, which relays the data to command centers in the field.

Perched as high as 20,000 feet, the drones give a real-time bird's-eye view of a combat zone to field commanders, and mission specialists say there is no ground encounter without a UAV flying overhead.

"These are the terrorists,'' says drone pilot Lt. E, whose name cannot be used due Israeli military policy, as he points to three blips on a video of the battle at Bint Jbail last week, a village where at least eight Israeli soldiers were killed last week. "They're lying here on a stakeout, and our forces are just around here. We tried to target them from the air, and they ran and hid inside a mosque.''

That is one the drawbacks of the drones' surveillance equipment, say operators. Once targets go behind a wall, they become invisible. And in a region where Hizbullah is believed to be concealing thousands of rockets in houses and in sheds, that makes for a dangerous and slow-going game of cat and mouse between the Israeli army and guerrillas.

"There's no secret weapon that you can use a push a button and it will show you where everything is,'' says Lt. E. "If we wanted to map all the bunkers along the border, we could, but we don't have the time.''

Collateral damage

An Israeli drone fired a rocket at a Lebanese military jeep yesterday killing a soldier it says it thought was a Hizbullah member. The attack came hours after Israel's Air Force announced the suspension of most of its bombing runs in a 48-hour gesture meant to allow southern Lebanese villagers to flee the war zone.

The missed target highlights how difficult it is for the Israeli Air Force to remain aggressive in pursuing Hizbullah while at the same time avoiding collateral damage from its hunt for Hizbullah targets.

Though the systems have been deployed for years in the skies over the Gaza Strip, they haven't avoided dozens of bystander deaths in attempted assassinations on Palestinian militant leaders.

In addition to the images provided by the drones, target identification often relies on the credibility of other forms of intelligence such as satellite pictures and data from field agents.

"Connecting at the right moment between the target and the munition is very, very difficult. You don't always succeed. You miss it more often,'' said Yiftach Shapir, an analyst at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. "You need very good command control systems to do that, and you need well-trained people to do it. And this is what is so difficult.''

Reducing casualties

At the 200th Squadron's base, the drone pilots argue that their images provide enough information to abort as many as two-thirds of the attacks ordered by the Air Force.

Showing footage of an attack on an apartment block in southern Beirut that left neighboring buildings standing, they say they are convinced that the technology reduces collateral damage from the war on both sides.

Former Israeli military intelligence officer Yakov Armidror says that the drone technology has helped reduce the missile launches on Israel in the past few days. But he acknowledges that to clean Lebanon out of rockets, it requires low-tech ground fighting.

"Those who think that by technology everything can be resolved will be disappointed,'' he says. "The real answer is a combination of good old infantry on the ground, and close support of long-range capability technology.''


3. THE BATTLE FOR LEBANON
Has Israel’s assault weakened Hezbollah—or made it stronger?
by JON LEE ANDERSON

On a deceptively peaceful afternoon in the last week of July, Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah strategist, puffed on a cigar and spooned up a dish of ice cream. Three scoops: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. We were sitting in Lina’s Café, on Rue Hamra, in downtown Beirut. For eleven days, the city had been shuttered, nearly empty of people and traffic, as the Israeli military pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south of the country, where Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” had dug its tunnels and bunkers and stored thousands of Iranian-built missiles. Bridges, tunnels, roads, and apartment buildings lay in ruins, and almost three-quarters of a million Lebanese had fled their homes in fear. But for the moment, at least, Ali Fayyad ate his ice cream in peace. Some of the shops were open, and more people were out on the street, because Condoleezza Rice was in town to meet with the Lebanese leadership and everyone figured—rightly––that the Israelis would hold fire over downtown Beirut until she left.

Fayyad is a burly man in his forties. As a member of the Hezbollah politburo, he is close to the group’s supreme leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and everything he told me at Lina’s, about the cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others on July 12th, and the all-out armed conflict that followed, was an authorized version. “Our aim is to get Israel to return Lebanese lands”—he meant Shebaa Farms, a small strip of land occupied by Israel since 1967—“and to release three of our prisoners,” Fayyad said. “One of the prisoners has been held for almost thirty years.” He was referring to Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese man who, in 1979, killed an Israeli man and his four-year-old daughter. (Another daughter, who was two, was accidentally smothered when her mother tried to keep her quiet in the crawl space where they were hiding.)

“We’ve made many efforts to have them returned, and have tried everything, including diplomacy, with no results,” Fayyad said. “So we were left with no other choice but to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The idea was ‘prisoners for prisoners.’ And we have exchanged prisoners with Israel in the past.”

If that really was Hezbollah’s plan, it went wrong from the beginning. Tensions were already high, because of the Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in Gaza, two weeks earlier, and Israel responded with bombing raids, including one, the next day, on Beirut’s airport. That night, a rocket fired from Hezbollah territory hit Haifa, and more missiles, in both directions, soon followed, resulting in casualties and the threat of regional war.

Fayyad seemed both surprised and offended by the scale of the Israeli attack, which he said Hezbollah never expected. Although Hezbollah’s rockets were landing in Haifa, Nahariya, Safed, and Nazareth, he also claimed that it had been reluctant to target civilians. “First, for humanitarian and moral reasons, and, second, because when civilians are killed we come out as the losers,” he said. “Far more of our people get killed than Israel’s.” Still, for Fayyad, the events had the logic of reprisal: Israel had hit “civilian infrastructure,” and so Hezbollah fired rockets into “occupied Palestine,” by which he meant all of Israel.

The past two weeks have represented a return to first principles for Hezbollah, which was founded in the early eighties, after Israel invaded Lebanon. The group became known internationally when it was accused of bombing the United States Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing two hundred and forty-one American servicemen; that was followed by attacks on Israeli targets around the world. In Lebanon, Hezbollah draws support, in the Shiite community and beyond, for its role in driving the Israeli occupation forces out of the country in 2000. Since then, Hezbollah has presented itself as a political party, gaining two posts in the Lebanese cabinet and fourteen seats in the parliament. But, rather than disarming, it bolstered its military capacity, with Iranian and Syrian help. Now that it is under siege, the contradictions of its position—as part of the Lebanese state, but also as a clandestine body that subverts it—are plainer than ever. On July 14th, Nasrallah went on television and addressed Israel directly: “You wanted an open war. We are heading toward an open war, and we are ready for it.”

The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his novice Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, quickly shifted their aims from retrieving the soldiers to destroying, or at least crippling, Hezbollah. Hundreds of Lebanese had already been killed, most of them civilians; dozens of Israelis had been killed, about half of them civilians. As Fayyad considered these numbers, he puffed on his cigar and said that Israel, and not Hezbollah, had made the greater strategic miscalculation.

“The real battle started four days ago, when the Israelis moved their troops into Lebanon, and it became a ground war,” he said. “That is the preferred situation for Hezbollah. They fought four days to take Maroun al-Ras, just one mile from the border, on very open ground, with tanks—four days.” A few days after our conversation, control of Maroun al-Ras was still in dispute, and Israel was facing more resistance than expected in the village of Bint Jbail.

But Hezbollah’s interests are not reducible to the conventional terms of a casualty balance sheet. Hezbollah has embedded itself deep within Lebanese society, in effect creating a state within a state, with an extensive social-service network. Even if Israel manages to dislodge Hezbollah’s fighters, Nasrallah will likely remain the most powerful politician in the country, in part because the chaos of the last weeks has exposed the weakness of the government. Most of the Lebanese analysts I spoke with said they believed that Hezbollah had, on its own terms, been significantly strengthened by the conflict.

The damage to Lebanon, meanwhile, has been catastrophic. Fayyad said that he had arranged to evacuate his father from the family home in a village near the Israeli border, but he emphasized that Hezbollah’s forces would not leave south Lebanon without a fight. “You must remember that the point of resistance is not to hold ground and face off in front of another position,” Fayyad said. “That is classical warfare, but we are guerrillas. If the Israelis want to take the territory all the way up to the Litani River, do you think they can do it without heavy casualties?”

Fayyad finished his ice cream and stubbed out his cigar. Before we left Lina’s, he said, “This doesn’t mean that the battle isn’t difficult for us. It is. It’s painful, too. But the longer it goes on the harder it will be for them.”

Across town, the talks between Condoleezza Rice and the Lebanese faltered the moment she announced that the Bush Administration would not yet press Israel for a ceasefire. “It doesn’t do any good to raise false hopes,” she said after a meeting with Lebanese, European, and U.N. officials in Rome two days later. “It’s not going to happen. . . . I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken ceasefires.”

On July 23rd, the day before Rice’s visit, I’d made my way toward the cities and towns of the Shia south––Hezbollistan, as some call it. I drove from Beirut with a few photographers, taking back roads to bypass the mangled highway interchanges and bridges. The only cars we saw were racing in the opposite direction, to the relative safety of the north, usually in caravans of seven or eight. Most were packed with families, who had attached makeshift white flags to the sideview mirrors. The previous week, an Israeli missile had hit a van full of refugees, killing sixteen of them. Some drivers flashed their lights, warning us not to proceed; most passed by at high speed, the expressions on their faces grim, intent, and scared.

Approaching Tyre, we saw that a bomb had gouged out a crater, twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, in the middle of the road. Nearby, a black S.U.V. sat accordioned and empty; it had crashed into a telephone pole. From the sky came the whoosh of a fighter jet and, much closer, the whine of a drone.

We pulled over to make way for a convoy of refugees. One driver, a man wearing a white T-shirt and steering a large black Mercedes-Benz, had several frightened-looking women and children in the back seat. As he slowed down to edge past the crater, he yelled out to us, in English, “We will never go back! We must leave this country.” In another car, a woman pointed to a child and said, frantically, “Down syndrome.” A teen-ager poked his head out of yet another car and exclaimed wildly, “U.S. Embassy!” A muffled explosion sounded, coming from beyond the city.

Over the next half hour, several more groups of cars made the run. One had its roof caved in and one of its sides smashed; it seemed impossible that anyone could drive it, but, as it came nearer, I saw an older man behind the wheel, his body bent and his head low to one side. As he passed, he called out that he had been with a woman—“a journalist like you”—and added, “She’s dead.” Later that day, news reports confirmed that a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese photographer, Layal Nejib, had been killed when an Israeli missile struck near her car on the road south of Tyre.

We turned north, to a hospital in Sidon. A large group of people—men, women wearing chadors, and children—were talking and crying at once. I recognized the man in the white T-shirt who had passed us by the crater. He appeared to be in shock, walking back and forth, trembling and shouting; several men were trying to calm him down. He was soaked with sweat. Three members of his family had been wounded. I walked up to the man and said that I had seen him less than an hour before. He turned and shouted, accusingly, “You were there and I talked to you—and then they hit us!”

Near the hospital, a mosque lay in ruins. Next door was a technical college and school run by the Hariri Foundation, which was established by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in a car bombing in February, 2005. (A preliminary U.N. report implicated Syrian intelligence; the investigation is incomplete.) One of the mosque’s white domes, still intact, was propped up, bizarrely, on top of the debris. Strips of the mosque’s red carpet, shredded by the explosion, hung from the branches of nearby trees.

A man approached and told me that he was a teacher at the Hariri school. I asked him why he thought the Israelis had hit a mosque, and he said, simply, “It was a Hezbollah mosque.” As he led me onto the grounds, a caretaker began yelling in Arabic about “Israel” and “America,” but the teacher shooed him away. I found a leaflet that had been dropped by the Israelis. It showed caricatures of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad; Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader based in Damascus, playing flutes around an urn; from it emerged the bearded face of Nasrallah. “At your service,” the caption read.

A younger man came up to me and, when we were out of earshot of others, said that Hezbollah had kept bombs in the basement of the mosque, but that two days earlier a truck had taken the cache away. It was common knowledge in Sidon, he said, and everyone was expecting the mosque to be hit. When, the previous evening, displaced people from the south had gathered on the grounds, they had been warned away.

“Everybody wants to end this Hezbollah regime, but nobody can say anything,” the young man said. He told me that he had been to the United States. “I know how the people are there, what they eat and how they live and think, and we don’t have anything like that here. We would like to live like that, without all this”—he waved toward the ruined mosque—“normally, the way you do.” He hoped that the Israelis would be successful. When another Lebanese man came up and joined us, he stopped talking. Before we parted, I asked him if he was a Christian. He looked surprised. “No,” he said. “I am Muslim. Sunni.”

Sunni and Christian politicians often publicly declare their solidarity with the Shiite Hezbollah, which routinely refers to itself as a Lebanese national “resistance movement.” But the sectarian fault lines have been affected by the current crisis. The population is estimated to be thirty-five per cent Christian, thirty-five per cent Shiite, twenty-five per cent Sunni, and five per cent Druze, and government posts are allocated to specific groups—the Prime Minister must be Sunni, for example. “Civil war is on everyone’s mind, but it’s the one thing nobody wants to talk about,” an affluent Maronite Christian businessman told me over dinner at a restaurant in a Maronite enclave in the hills above Beirut. I was there with two couples—the other man, also a Christian, was a well-known former government minister—on the restaurant’s terrace. Like many people with money, they had moved their families to the hills. The restaurant’s sound system was playing a song by Fairouz, Lebanon’s most famous singer and a national idol, whose beautiful laments evoke emotions in the Lebanese the same way that Edith Piaf once did for the French in wartime.

My hosts had been telling me, with a certain pride, how the monasteries and schools in the area had taken in thousands of Shiite refugees from the south. “This kind of thing has never happened before,” the former minister said. “Most of the people from these two communities have never had this sort of contact with each other. But they have been taken in, and they are getting along.” He saw it as a promising sign of “inter-communal solidarity.” After all, he said, the attacks had been directed not only against the Shiites but against Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Down the table, the businessman said that he wondered why, with all the resources Hezbollah had at its disposal—it receives an estimated hundred million dollars a year from Iran—it hadn’t done more to protect its civilian population. “Why didn’t Hezbollah prepare for this?” he said. “Where is the food, the medicines? Where are the shelters for the people? Maybe, out of this, people will begin to question why they had to suffer because of the will of one man.” He meant Nasrallah.

Speaking about the Shiite refugees, who were now dependent on aid handouts, his wife asked, “What will happen when October comes and winter begins? Will they stay? Will they have homes to return to? All through the civil war, I stayed in Lebanon—I never wanted to leave—but in just two weeks they have destroyed everything we have built in the fifteen years since the war ended, and now I don’t want to stay anymore. This time, I want to leave.”

A moment later, a distant rumble could be heard. “Are those bombs?” she said. “Is that what I am hearing? Here?” Neither her husband nor the ex-minister acknowledged her. But then there was another, louder explosion, and she asked again.

“We are hearing Fairouz,” the ex-minister said sternly, cocking a thumb toward the sound system. He said this as if to tell her, “Don’t spoil the evening,” but afterward he brooded, and everyone at the table sat silently, listening to the music and, unavoidably, to the explosions in the distance.

When I arrived at the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik, in Beirut’s predominantly Shiite southern suburbs, it had just been pummelled, as it had every day since the bombing began. Most of the residents, who lived in concrete apartment blocks, had left. It had been risky for reporters to go to the neighborhood, both because of the Israeli bombardment and because of the remaining Hezbollah sentinels, who were tense and suspicious. But now Hezbollah was conducting a press tour of its ruins.

I found my way to the rendezvous point, at a bombed-out highway interchange, where fifty or sixty journalists had gathered—reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. An energetic young man named Hussein Naboulsi, who runs Hezbollah’s press office, announced that the tour would be fast, and that no one should stray from the group. He then headed off so quickly that people had to sprint to keep up. Hezbollah men kept an eye on the sky, and on us.

We walked past entire apartment blocks that had been flattened. The streets were littered with chunks of concrete, insulation material, twisted aluminum shutters, broken glass, and dangling electrical wires, and it became difficult to walk. Naboulsi paused and waved his arms and said loudly, “You see? This is where ordinary people live. This is what the Israelis do.”

In front of a row of wrecked shop- fronts, he declared, “This is revenge against Lebanon, the only country that has shown itself able to defeat Israel.” We reached an open area where the buildings had been completely levelled. Naboulsi pointed to some rubble and said, “This is where the Hezbollah Media Relations office used be. Now there’s no place for me to work.” He claimed that, apart from this and a center for social charity, there hadn’t been any Hezbollah offices around there—only civilian targets. He then led the group away from the area where, I had heard, Hezbollah’s security headquarters had stood. In Beirut, many people believed that Sheikh Nasrallah was still in the neighborhood, in a bunker, although there were also rumors that he was in Damascus or at the Iranian Embassy.

Naboulsi suddenly yelled, “Jet fighters in the sky!” He urged the journalists to hurry to their cars; the tour was over.


One evening, on a rooftop balcony in the eastern-Beirut district of Ashrafieh, I met with Jamil Mroue, a secular Shiite and the editor of Beirut’s English-language newspaper, the Daily Star . Mroue, a big, handsome silver-haired man of fifty-six, nursed a glass of whiskey and looked out over the sea, where two gray American destroyers were prowling the Mediterranean. After staring at the ships for a minute, Mroue began to vent his frustration.

“Even after 9/11, there is this expectation in the U.S. and Israel that some unspoken middle class is just sitting there waiting to inherit the ruins of whatever country it is that they are obliterating. But there is no calculation that, if they flatten Lebanon and Nasrallah comes out of hiding and is given a microphone to deliver a speech, he can topple governments. He has been extraordinarily empowered by this. Israel and America are still obsessed with destroying hardware. But if you do this with Hezbollah you just propagate what you want to destroy”—that is, an unmoored fighting force. “Do I want to live under Hezbollah?,” he said. “No, I don’t. But the same errors that the Americans made in Iraq are the ones being made here. You get rid of Nasrallah not by destroying his guns but by helping to create a sustainable society.”

Mroue went on, “In the beginning, in the eighties, Hezbollah controlled the night, but by 2000 it controlled the day, even as the Israeli soldiers were huddled in their bunkers.” He said that it was unfair to ask Lebanon’s fragile government to do what the Israelis couldn’t in their eighteen-year occupation. “Do you want to use a sledgehammer? Well, do you remember the Israeli minister who compared Arabs to lice? Try hitting lice with a sledgehammer!”

Mroue sipped his whiskey and said, “Hezbollah will most likely come out of this with its infrastructure shattered, but then comes the soapbox with the highly cerebral underdog—Nasrallah—and there will be a camera crew there from CNN or Al Arabiya, and he will go on camera and say ‘Do this,’ and people will.”

Mroue’s point of view was common not only among secular Shiites but among Christians and Sunnis who normally had little use for Hezbollah yet despaired of the effect of Israel’s bombing and the Bush Administration’s refusal to rein in the Olmert government.

“Before the war, probably eighty or ninety per cent of Lebanese were against Hezbollah,” Mroue said despondently. “But now I’d say it’s around fifty, teetering on sixty per cent—in favor.” Those numbers were guesses; the breadth and depth of Hezbollah’s support is one of the great uncertainties in the crisis. Mroue cited an old Saudi tribal proverb: “If you know the price of a man’s ransom, kill him.” The ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man’s tribe in revenge for his death. “In other words, if you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead,” Mroue said. “But here, who knows what the price of the ransom is?”

Hussein Rahal runs Hezbollah’s information bureau, and, like other Hezbollah officials, he had gone underground. I met him by prearrangement in a borrowed office in a government building. Rahal was a study in gray: he wore a gray suit, had cropped gray hair, and had a gray stubble beard. He was taking the long view. “We have lived in this situation before. All wars end, and when this one does we will be victorious, because we will stand fast, and the situation we have now will be changed. Right now, the neoconservatives, as part of their strategy to reshape the Middle East, are encouraging Israel to escalate its war against Lebanon, which means that the U.S. Administration is taking a leading part in a war, one that the American people have no say in.” Rahal paused, and added carefully, “But Hezbollah does not want to cause any harm to the American people.” He went on, “The U.S. runs the risk of bringing down the Lebanese state it says it wants to support. And if this happens it could take the whole region into a new stage of the conflict—and who benefits from that?

“War is always two-sided, and you must test both sides’ ability to stand fast. We have weapons that we did not have in 1996. The casualties for Israel in a ground war will be very high. And we have only one choice, and that is to survive.”

The broadcast facilities of Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar, were bombed––the Israelis consider it the group’s most powerful propaganda arm—but it somehow managed to stay on the air. When I asked Ibrahim Mussawi, the editor of foreign news at Al Manar, about the damage the country had sustained, he said, “We’ve managed with thirty-five billion dollars of national debt”—Lebanon’s current debt. “What will it cost to rebuild the new damage? Four, five billion? If we could manage thirty-five, then we can manage forty billion. Bad as it is, maybe some good can come out of this; maybe after this it will be the right time to settle all our problems in Lebanon, all of the ‘isms’ we are famous for: nepotism, corruptionism.” Mussawi seemed to be suggesting that the best solution for Lebanon’s ills, when the war was over, was a government led by the Party of God.

For now, it is not clear who is running Lebanon. Rice came to Beirut in part to express support for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who came to power after the “Cedar revolution,” the mass protests against Syrian interference in Lebanon that followed Hariri’s murder. Siniora, a Sunni, had criticized Hezbollah, but was openly in despair about the lack of U.S. support for a ceasefire; in Rome, he called the air war “barbaric.”

One politician Rice pointedly snubbed during her visit was the country’s President, Émile Lahoud, a Maronite who is widely seen as a tool of Syria. I met with him at the Presidential palace a few hours before Rice arrived. He was deeply tanned, and looked like an older, fleshier version of Tony Blair.

Lahoud told me how pleased he was that I had come to Lebanon to see the “truth” of what was happening. “Unfortunately, Americans have a very erroneous picture,” he said. “It’s—you know, they have a very strong media. Israel is all over the world.”

He spoke vehemently about the “infamy” of the Israeli attacks. “The Israelis said it was because of the taking of two hostages. Well, it is not true. They want to break the infrastructure, because Lebanon is a very big competitor of Israel, from the touristic point of view and with anything—regional trade, finance. So the Israelis don’t want Lebanon to prosper.” He added, “But the most important reason is that they want to take revenge, because we liberated our land.”

I asked Lahoud if he believed, as I had heard other Lebanese say, that Israel wanted to spark a civil war in Lebanon. “Yes,” he said. “Israel is happy when Lebanese fight each other.” He added, “Washington wants whatever Israel wants, unfortunately. For many reasons. The main one, you know”—Lahoud gave me a knowing look—“the lobby , and elections.

“Look, you can see the bombs from here,” Lahoud said. He led me to the window, and we looked down at the southern suburbs. A plume of gray smoke was rising rapidly.

On July 27th—the morning after Israel lost nine soldiers in clashes with Hezbollah, and two days after its missiles hit a U.N. outpost, killing four observers—I met a Western diplomat in Beirut. He told me that, while both Hezbollah and Israel had miscalculated, Hezbollah, at this point, had the advantage. “The casualties inflicted by Israel’s air campaign play right into Hezbollah’s hands. Hezbollah certainly thinks it’s winning. Even if it loses popularity among Druze, Sunnis, and Christians, its popularity remains high among Shiites, and for Hezbollah that’s all that really counts.”

Pointing to his head, he said, “In the end, the battle is between the ears. If, as a result of this, the Lebanese people get sick of Hezbollah, and if they turn on it and disarm it, that would be great.” A less favorable scenario was for the fighting to end inconclusively, with Hezbollah allowed to return to its former status. Still, he said, that might at least “show the Lebanese that there are serious consequences for supporting Hezbollah.”

The diplomat said that if anyone had benefitted from the confrontation, it was the government in Tehran. “Iran’s role in this has been huge,” he said. “I don’t know what role, if any, it had in the abductions, but I think it does encourage Hezbollah’s fighting on the border, and its arms shipments have been impressive. Without any cost to Iran, Lebanon is getting devastated, Israel is taking hits, and the Iranians are getting distraction from the nuclear issue. They must be very happy right now.”

The degree to which Hezbollah, fortified by its sponsors in Iran and Syria, has constrained Lebanon’s political dialogue was brought home to me by Nayla Mouawad, Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs. Mouawad, a Maronite, is the widow of former President René Mouawad, who was assassinated in 1989, the main suspects being Syria or a domestic political opponent. When I asked about Hezbollah, Mouawad chose her words very carefully. “We thought we needed Hezbollah to be a part of the government, and we gave it ministries to give it confidence to join in the nation-building. We thought that we could not implement a settlement by force, but through national dialogue.” Mouawad said that she wanted a ceasefire, but that afterward the Lebanese Army should assume control of the entire country. She was worried about it, though. “Divisions still exist in this country,” she said. “If a comprehensive settlement is not implemented, we are going to have problems. There will be people counting their losses—and the losses are tremendous—and looking for someone to blame.” She added, “Lebanon is paying the price for Syrian and Iranian interests.”

She noted that the Lebanese government agreed with some of Hezbollah’s demands, including the return of Shebaa farms and prisoners. “We need to convince Hezbollah that only a strong Lebanese nation and state could preserve its future as a party, as a Lebanese party—not as an armed political faction.” Mouawad paused, and said, “I am very much aware that the moment we are living now may be better than the one we are going to live through.”

Despite its losses, Hezbollah remains conspicuously in control in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Outsiders are stopped and interrogated by men who seem to materialize out of nowhere, riding on motor scooters. A few days after the press tour, I returned to visit an underground refuge for displaced Shiite civilians; a Hezbollah official had approved the visit.

My car pulled up outside the Farms Superstore, a modern supermarket in a concrete-and-glass building. After a round of questioning, I was allowed to proceed but only in the company of a Hezbollah man, who carried a black portfolio. Like most Hezbollah men, he wore a light beard, in the Iranian fashion. He led the way down into the three-level parking garage beneath the store, a vast, clean space of rubberized gray floors and support columns. There were no vehicles in sight; instead, at every other column or so, there were Lebanese families sitting and reclining on reed mats and foam-rubber mattresses. Each family had neat bundles of blankets and plastic bags of clothing and food. A few had electric fans, and one group was gathered around a television. They were mostly women and children, with some older men and teen-age boys; I saw few men in their twenties or thirties. The Hezbollah man said that there were three hundred and sixty families in the garage—approximately two thousand people.

In one corner, children played on swings, a slide, and a small carrousel. Our escort said that Hezbollah had provided the equipment. He added that Hezbollah had set up a clinic and a pharmacy.

As we walked down to the next level, two teen-age boys, who had been squabbling, began throwing punches at one another. The escort grabbed them and sent them away with a reprimand. A few minutes later, we were approached by a young man named Ali. He held the hand of a wide-eyed girl of six or seven. He said he was from the southern town of Marjayoun. “I have been here six days,” he said. “I am tired, but I’m not scared.” He said that he had volunteered his services to Hezbollah, patrolling the refuge at night, “to see if anyone needs anything.” Speaking of the Hezbollah leader, who the night before had made a television appearance, he said, “Sheikh Nasrallah said last night that it will last a long time. So here I am.”

A middle-aged woman in a black chador came over. When I asked if she minded living underground, she smiled and said, in a gravelly voice, “It’s all the same to me. If Israel and America want to do this to us, all we can do is to bear the situation, so if we have to stay underground we will. We don’t mind staying here as long as the boys are O.K.”—a reference to Hezbollah’s fighters—“and as long as Sheikh Nasrallah is fine. We can bear anything. Death is normal to us, and, anyway, it means we’ll go to heaven.” She told us that four children had been born in the underground garage. Two were boys, and they had been named Waaed, which means “the promising one,” and Sadeq, which means “the truthful one,” “because Sheikh Nasrallah says, ‘We have the promise of liberating the south.’ ” She added, “We don’t think the Israelis will come to Beirut, but, if they do, we know what to do with them.” A young pregnant woman standing next to her laughed and made lunging, stabbing motions with her hand.