Lebanon: pundits think Hezbollah wins, even if they lose

1. Going the Distance
A longtime CIA official says Hezbollah wins the battle with Israel simply by surviving.
By Robert Padavick

Has Hezbollah emerged as a victor of sorts after three weeks of fighting with Israel?

Milt Bearden says yes. And he's in a good position to address the question. Now retired, he serves on the board of directors of Conflicts Forum, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization that works to foster dialogue between Islamist groups and the West. In that role he says he has been in talks with Hezbollah officials about the group's transition to a more politically-focused party, both before and after the 2005 Lebanese elections in which Hezbollah won 14 parliament seats nationwide.

Hezbollah, Bearden says, has begun to look a bit like an overmatched boxer who has stood up to 15 rounds of pounding and made it to the closing bell without being knocked out — like the movie character Rocky.

"In the movie," Bearden says, "Rocky lost. But nobody believes that. All you have to do is go the distance. And the reality here is that, I think you're going to see Hezbollah has gone the distance."

Bearden dismisses the idea of knocking out Hezbollah through military activity. "The concept of dismantling or eliminating Hezbollah is fatally flawed from the very start. Hezbollah is an organic part of that 40 percent of the Lebanese population that is Shia."

And with Hezbollah still standing, he says, a new power dynamic has emerged. "There's nothing to compare with the Israeli Defense Force in the Mideast," he says, but Hezbollah's persistence through weeks of air strikes has shown the limits of Israel's strength. "We talk about 20 Hezbollah fighters killed today, or whatever the new numbers are. That's nothing. There are 500 that will pick up the weapons behind them now."

"In the Middle East," Bearden says, "the winners and losers are never who you might think they are."

I asked Bearden about Hezbollah's possible role at the bargaining table.

"They've got a lot of very smart people. These are not a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics," he says.

"But they've always been willing to try to broaden the dialogue quietly. In the last year I've been in many hours of meetings with some of them, to where I can guarantee you that they would have welcomed a quiet dialogue with the United States, and they have repeatedly said they have no great quarrel with the United States."

But in the West, Hezbollah is widely labeled a terrorist organization. It has been responsible for numerous attacks against Israel, including the incident that sparked the latest conflict, as well as the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which left 241 servicemen dead.

As Israel ramps up its ground offensive against Hezbollah amid faltering diplomatic efforts for a resolution to the crisis, I also discussed with Bearden the implications of a rapidly evolving landscape in the Mideast. Below are excerpts of our conversation.

PADAVICK: Why do you think the Bush administration is so resistant to joining the international chorus here, and calling for an immediate cease-fire as a first step, and then working from there?

BEARDEN: Well I think they're going to have to get closer to that. But I think they still believe what (Israeli Prime Minister) Olmert is telling them, "Just give us two more days, five more days, 10 more days ... and we'll have this thing cleared up and we'll be okay."

PADAVICK: To push that point, to what extent do you think that is backfiring, or at least creating a unity on the Arab street that we haven't seen before? You have even al-Qaida seemingly joining the cause here and uniting behind Hezbollah.

BEARDEN: The costs will get down into the grass with this, on cooperation with everything, from counterterrorism to energy. The U.S. used to have the red flag. In every other conflict, it would go for a while, and if we waved the red flag, I guarantee you, the thing stopped.

But now we're the ones that are in lockstep [with Israel] ... and this is not even good for Israel. It must come as a shock to the cooler heads in Israel that we weren't there as some sort of restraint. And giving that up can't be good for Israel, because now they have exposed one thing that they never wanted to expose, and that is that invincible military prowess is a myth, no matter whether it's Israel or the U.S.

PADAVICK: A very important issue obviously is how Iran is looking to emerge from this.

BEARDEN: They haven't been hurt at all. First off, Hezbollah is the current darling of everybody in the Middle East, and even the Sunni-Shia thing is put aside from that, mainly because of what they've accomplished by not being destroyed. And if you step back and look at a larger piece of the Middle East, the Iranians must wake up every morning and say, "What's the catch?"

Think about it. They've got a Shia south of Iraq . They've got the Shia that could emerge as the dominant force in Lebanon. They've got the Americans bogged down forever doing the Shias' heavy lifting in the Sunni areas of Iraq. Kurdistan is independent already in [northern Iraq]. And we've got ourselves a narco-state war in Afghanistan that goes on without end. What would you say? You'd say, "What's the catch?"

PADAVICK: How do you see this affecting the broad swath of U.S. Middle East policy?

BEARDEN: I think we've probably given up any possible role as honest broker, even though there's no one to replace us ... The concept of a tsunami of democracy (in the Middle East) is done for. I think that's ended, particularly when the world realizes that the first two democratically elected entities — Hamas and Hezbollah — that we have been providing the weaponry to take them down.

The push for democracy in countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia is off the table now. They can say, "look, we have our own problems just like you see in Lebanon, and we can't let [Islamic parties] win an election because we'd have the same thing that's happened there, or happened in Gaza, and you know how bad that is, so give us a little slack here."

(Editor's Note: Hot Zone Senior Producer Robert Padavick spoke with Yahoo! News consultant Milt Bearden about the shifting developments in Israel 's battle with Hezbollah. In a career spanning three decades, Bearden headed the CIA 's Soviet and Eastern Europe Division, and served as station chief in places like Pakistan and Sudan. He also ran the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan from 1986-1989.)


2. Ground to a Halt – by ROBERT PAPE (from NY Times)

ISRAEL has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hezbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will learn that ground power won’t work either. The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Hezbollah is principally neither a political party nor an Islamist militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. At first it consisted of a small number of Shiites supported by Iran. But as more and more Lebanese came to resent Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah — never tight-knit — expanded into an umbrella organization that tacitly coordinated the resistance operations of a loose collection of groups with a variety of religious and secular aims.

In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable to, say, a religious cult like the Taliban than to the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960’s. What made its rise so rapid, and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was not its international support but the fact that it evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese social groups.

Evidence of the broad nature of Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hezbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks — which included the infamous bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 — involved 41 suicide terrorists.

In writing my book on suicide attackers, I had researchers scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and the biographies of the Hezbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. Shockingly, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups like the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union. Three were Christians, including a female high-school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.

What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.

Thus the new Israeli land offensive may take ground and destroy weapons, but it has little chance of destroying the Hezbollah movement. In fact, in the wake of the bombings of civilians, the incursion will probably aid Hezbollah’s recruiting.

Equally important, Israel’s incursion is also squandering the good will it had initially earned from so-called moderate Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The countries are the court of opinion that matters because, while Israel cannot crush Hezbollah, it could achieve a more limited goal: ending Hezbollah’s acquisition of more missiles through Syria.

Given Syria’s total control of its border with Lebanon, stemming the flow of weapons is a job for diplomacy, not force. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, Sunni-led nations that want stability in the region, are motivated to stop the rise of Hezbollah. Under the right conditions, the United States might be able to help assemble an ad hoc coalition of Syria’s neighbors to entice and bully it to prevent Iranian, Chinese or other foreign missiles from entering Lebanon. It could also offer to begin talks over the future of the Golan Heights.

But Israel must take the initiative. Unless it calls off the offensive and accepts a genuine cease-fire, there are likely to be many, many dead Israelis in the coming weeks — and a much stronger Hezbollah.

(Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”)


3. Who Is Winning the Peace in Lebanon?
Analysis: The question being fought out on the battlefield and in the diplomatic chambers boils down to this: Can Hizballah be allowed to emerge with its head held high?
By TONY KARON

Even as Israel extends its military's reach deeper into Lebanon, the war there may now increasingly be more about perception than position. After three weeks of fighting, the tenacity of Hizballah's fighters in the face of fierce Israeli air and ground assaults, and their continued ability to lob rockets into Israel, has created a problem of perception for both Israel's leaders and the Bush Administration. The Israeli public has been questioning whether the war is actually being won, while Hizballah's survival as a fighting force and its ability to exact a price from Israel has boosted its standing not only in Lebanon, but throughout the Arab world. Indeed, if international demands for a truce are heeded on the basis of the present battlefield reality, the outcome would look more like a hard-fought tie than a decisive victory for Israel. And that would be bad news both for the domestic political prospects of the current Israeli government and for the Bush administration's "new Middle East" agenda.

For that reason, the U.S. and Israel need to transform both the reality on the battlefield and the view of the outcome before any kind of truce takes effect. Israeli commando forces staged a raid in Baalbek, deep inside Hizballah's heartland, overnight Wednesday, capturing five of the organization's fighters in an operation that may have been designed to boost Israel's morale by recalling the bold audacity of raids deep inside enemy territory on which Israelis' confidence in their military is founded — from the lightning preemptive air strikes of June 1967, to the 1976 commando raid that rescued more than 100 hostages from a hijacked airliner at Uganda's Entebbe airport. More importantly, though, Israel has now sent thousands of troops across the border to attack Hizballah strongholds throughout southern Lebanon and clear a "security zone" that may eventually stretch to around three miles inside Lebanese territory. With diplomatic pressure mounting for an end to the fighting, the Israeli military seems to be bringing its campaign to a crescendo aimed at inflicting maximum damage on Hizballah in the campaign's remaining days or weeks.

Israeli officers themselves have been impressed by the tenacity of Hizballah's fighters: They have not flinched from engaging despite the Israelis' overwhelming advantages of airpower, armor and artillery. Instead, they're putting up strong resistance throughout the south, operating with a high degree of guerrilla professionalism in small, autonomous units that have prepared for six years to fight the Israelis on home turf. They have laid in supplies of food and ammunition, negating the requirement for short-term resupply. And rather than melting away before the advancing Israeli columns, Hizballah fighters are actually seeking out concentrations of Israeli forces in order to confront them. At the same time, as if to remind the Israeli public of their survival, Hizballah continues to rain down rockets on Israeli cities — Wednesday saw the heaviest fusillade yet — and the movement's Al-Manar television station continues to broadcast its version of events to an Arab audience eager to see the Israelis punished.

Israel's strategy is now premised on the arrival in the not-too-distant future of an international security force in south Lebanon. Until then, Israel is attacking Hizballah strongholds to degrade its military capability, while notably keeping its own forces mobile, rather than trying to hold the towns they have attacked. Digging in would require the establishment of supply lines and logistical support, and offer Hizballah just the sort of sitting-duck Israeli targets on which it thrived during Israel's two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel lost around 2,000 men in Lebanon over that period — a trauma that can only be understood in proportion to the total population size, i.e., as the equivalent of the U.S. losing 100,000 of its own troops. It has no intention of returning to that particular status quo ante.

But the terms on which an international force will be deployed is now the focus of an intensifying diplomatic fight. While most of the international community is likely to back the French demand for an immediate end to the fighting, followed by a cease-fire agreement to allow for the deployment of an international force to police such a truce, the U.S. is insisting that there be no demand for a halt to Israel's offensive until a mechanism is in place to disarm Hizballah. These differences are not diplomatic hair-splitting — they reflect profound differences over the fate of Hizballah. The only acceptable outcome for the U.S. is a defeat for Hizballah, because if the movement survives the onslaught with its independent military capability intact, it will be seen throughout the Arab world as the victors.

But the French, who are currently the prime candidates to lead an international force, are making clear that the international community is not going to finish the job for Israel, and will only police a cease-fire when one has been agreed to by the Lebanese government, which includes Hizballah. In other words, it won't try to disarm Hizballah unless Hizballah has agreed to be disarmed. And the only formula likely to achieve that objective on the basis of the current battlefield situation would be an agreement among Lebanese parties to somehow incorporate Hizballah's fighting forces into the Lebanese Army — which may not be quite what the U.S., and certainly not Israel, had in mind.

So as long as the diplomatic process remains at an impasse over whether Hizballah emerges intact to sign on to a peace deal, the terms of the peace will continued to be shaped not by the negotiations at the U.N., but by the bloodletting in south Lebanon.