Lebanon: who won, who lost, what the f is going to happen now?

1. A foretaste of larger furies to come -- by Rami G. Khouri (from Beirut’s Daily Star)

As I watched Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, making his frequent television addresses in recent weeks, especially on Monday night after the fighting had stopped, he seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than that as head of a single group in Lebanon's rich mosaic of parties. In tone and content, his remarks seemed like those that a president or prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering. His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.

The intense interest of some politicians, foreign leaders and many journalists in "when and how Hizbullah will be disarmed" is understandable. Israel, the United States, others in Europe and some in Lebanon have stressed this issue for many months, well before the war. But this focus is too narrow to be a useful peg for a full analysis of the political implications of this war. Hizbullah's arms should be assessed in the wider domestic, regional and international context in which they exist and operate.

That context has been clarified by the war, which inflicted severe human and material damage on the two countries. Now its political ripples will be felt throughout the Middle East, and perhaps further afield. One of these is the prominence of non-state actors, such as Hizbullah, that act with more efficacy and, in some cases, more legitimacy than some governments in the Arab world. The significant political fact is not only that such an organization has become very powerful in tandem with the formal Lebanese institutions of state, but also that it has in part provoked and single-handedly fought a war with a neighboring state - and emerged in rather good shape. So, Nasrallah speaks to the nation after the fighting stops.

This has serious implications for the whole region, which I expect we will now witness in the form of sharper political polarization, already seen in Lebanon. This polarization will take several forms. The first is rising tension and greater competition between official governments and non-state actors in the Arab world who have stepped into the void of credibility and impact that many Arab state institutions have forfeited in recent decades. Other like-minded movements in the Arab world will seek to emulate Hizbullah's organizational and political prowess.

A parallel polarization that has crystallized in the past year, and has been a theme of some recent Nasrallah speeches, is that between countries and political forces within the region that wage a regional cold war for the political identity of the Middle East. Syria and Iran, along with groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and others, are actively challenging the more conservative, often pro-Western states like Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Egypt. This contest will simmer for many years. This is closely linked to a wider contest focused around American-led pressure on Iran to stop its plans to develop a full nuclear fuel cycle.

The wider struggle beyond nuclear capability and Iran is about the ideological, social and economic orientation of the Middle East region. The Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah-led camp sees itself fighting back against Israeli and American hegemony in the region, while the US, closely allied with Israel, for its part speaks openly about creating a "new" Middle East of societies closely linked to Western values and interests.

Israel and its role in the region are integral to these strata of polarization, all of which intersect sharply in Lebanon - especially in Hizbullah's multiple roles as a political party, anti-occupation resistance group, and Islamist movement that sees itself as part of a wider regional identity.

The strength and assertiveness of the Islamist movements - whether through military confrontation like Hizbullah or through winning elections as in many other cases - is a sign that majorities of Arab citizens are not content to remain docile and dejected in the state of subjugation and defeat that has defined them for decades. Israel and the US have shown they are prepared to destroy an entire country to assert their interests if not also their dominance in this region. Most Arab countries watched all this on television, and sent relief supplies when Israel gave them permission to do so.

This convergence of worldviews and behavior does not augur well for a stable, peaceful Middle East. What we just witnessed in Lebanon and Israel may have been a terrible foretaste of larger furies to come, unless more rational minds prevail and work to ensure, once and for all, the equal rights of Arabs, Israelis, Iranians and all others in this region.

(Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR)


2. Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature -- by JOHN KIFNER

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As stunned Lebanese returned Tuesday over broken roads to shattered apartments in the south, it increasingly seemed that the beneficiary of the destruction was most likely to be Hezbollah .

A major reason — in addition to its hard-won reputation as the only Arab force that fought Israel to a standstill — is that it is already dominating the efforts to rebuild with a torrent of money from oil-rich Iran .

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country’s minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an “unlimited budget” for reconstruction.

In his victory speech on Monday night, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah , offered money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war.

“Completing the victory,” he said, “can come with reconstruction.”

On Tuesday, Israel began to pull many of its reserve troops out of southern Lebanon, and its military chief of staff said all of the soldiers could be back across the border within 10 days. Lebanese soldiers are expected to begin moving in a couple of days, supported by the first of 15,000 foreign troops.

While the Israelis began their withdrawal, hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.

In Sreifa, a Hezbollah official said the group would offer an initial $10,000 to residents to help pay for the year of rent, to buy new furniture and to help feed families.

In Taibe, a town of fighting so heavy that large chunks were missing from walls and buildings where they had been sprayed with bullets, the Audi family stood with two Hezbollah volunteers, looking woefully at their windowless, bullet- and shrapnel-torn house.

In Bint Jbail, Hezbollah ambulances — large, new cars with flashing lights on the top — ferried bodies of fighters to graves out of mountains of rubble.

Hezbollah’s reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network — as opposed to the Lebanese government, regarded by many here as sleek men in suits doing well — was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage.

“Hezbollah’s strength,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University here, who has written extensively about the organization, in large part derives from “the gross vacuum left by the state.”

Hezbollah was not, she said, a state within a state, but rather “a state within a nonstate, actually.”

Sheik Nasrallah said in his speech that “the brothers in the towns and villages will turn to those whose homes are badly damaged and help rebuild them.

“Today is the day to keep up our promises,” he said. “All our brothers will be in your service starting tomorrow.”

Some southern towns were so damaged that on Tuesday residents had not yet begun to return. A fighter for the Amal movement, another Shiite militia group, said he had been told that Hezbollah members would begin to catalog damages in his town, Kafr Kila, on the Israeli border.

Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed.

Although Hezbollah is a Shiite organization, Sheik Nasrallah’s message resounded even with a Sunni Muslim, Ghaleb Jazi, 40, who works at the oil storage plant at Jiyeh, 15 miles south of Beirut. It was bombed by the Israelis and spewed pollution northward into the Mediterranean.

“The government may do some work on bridges and roads, but when it comes to rebuilding houses, Hezbollah will have a big role to play,” he said. “Nasrallah said yesterday he would rebuild, and he will come through.”

Sheik Nasrallah’s speech was interpreted by some as a kind of watershed in Lebanese politics, establishing his group on an equal footing with the official government.

“It was a coup d’état,” said Jad al-Akjaoui, a political analyst aligned with the democratic reform bloc. He was among the organizers of the anti-Syrian demonstrations after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri two years ago that led to international pressure to rid Lebanon of 15 years of Syrian control.

Rami G. Khouri, a columnist for The Daily Star in Beirut, wrote that Sheik Nasrallah “seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon’s rich mosaic of political parties.”

“In tone and content, his remarks seemed more like those of a president or a prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering,” Mr. Khouri wrote. “His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.”

Defense Minister Elias Murr said Tuesday that the government would not seek to disarm Hezbollah.

“The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not,” he said, showing just how difficult reining in the militia will most likely be in the coming weeks and months. He added that “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah, had been cooperating with the government and there was no need to confront it.

Sheik Nasrallah sounded much like a governor responding to a disaster when he said, “So far, the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units.

“We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while,” he said. He also cautioned, “No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand.”

Support for Hezbollah was likely to become stronger, Professor Saad-Ghorayeb said, because of the weakness of the central government.

“Hezbollah has two pillars of support,” she said, “the resistance and the social services. What this war has illustrated is that it is best at both.

Referring to Shiek Nasrallah, she said: “He tells the people, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to protect you. And we’re going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver.’ ”

(Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Sreifa, Lebanon, for this article, Sabrina Tavernise from Taibe and Robert F. Worth from Jiyeh.)


3. Nasrallah didn't mean to -- by Amira Hass (from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

During the past month, Hezbollah's Katyushas killed 18 Israeli Arabs among the 41 Israeli civilians who died in the war. Clearly, Hassan Nasrallah didn't mean to kill them. But as someone who knows that many Arabs live in northern Israel, and as someone who knows that the launchers for his inaccurate Katyushas cannot choose the target they will hit - the fact that it was unintended is meaningless.

More than anyone, Israelis should understand Nasrallah's claims that this was "unintended," identify with the primacy he attaches to the "unintendedness" relative to the fatal results, and identify with the disjunction he creates between the rationale that is inherent in the war machine he has built and his subjective will. "We didn't mean to" is a mantra that is frequently recited in Israel when there is a discussion of the number of civilians - among them many children - who are killed by the Israel Defense Forces. To this, the claim that "they" (Hezbollah and the Palestinians) cynically exploit civilians by locating themselves among them and firing from their midst is automatically added.

This claim is made by citizens of a state who know very well where to turn off Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv to get to the security-military complex that is located in the heart of their civilian city; this claim is repeated by the parents of armed soldiers who bring their weapons home on weekends, and is recited by soldiers whose bases are adjacent to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who have shelled civilian Palestinian neighborhoods from positions and tanks that have been stationed inside civilian settlements.

"We didn't mean to" is the cousin of "I didn't know," and both of them are close neighbors of the double standard. What is permitted to us is forbidden to others. What hurts us does not hurt others (because they are "other").

IDF soldiers have killed 44 children in Gaza since June 28, when the failed campaign to release abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit began. That is 44 children out of the 188 people the IDF has killed in Gaza - civilians and armed men, most of whom had embarked on a doomed fight against the invading tanks. The last three who were killed, on Monday, were three farmers from Beit Hanoun who were hit by an IDF shell - about as precise as a Hezbollah Katyusha - instead of the rocket launcher it had been intended to hit.

The road to killing children by a military and civilian occupation machine is paved with many non-intentions to cause other damage to civilians; these are not fatal immediately, but day by day, they take away the taste of life from 3.5 million people. These are damages that in ordinary times earn, at best, a mention the size of a postage stamp in the newspapers.

But these are the essential building stones of a regime of dispossession, the aim of which is to thwart the Palestinian people's aspirations for independence and sovereignty in its country. The callousness and cruelty that are required for carrying this out have become second nature for hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Unintentionally. Here are a number of typical examples: the identity card that a soldier confiscated in the middle of the night, which then gets lost, and its bearer cannot move on the roads and travel to work and has to pay a fortune, in his terms, for a new one; endless delays in the hot sun at roadblocks and at Civil Administration counters (and more loss of workdays); land confiscation orders; new blockages of village entrances; preventing the exit of all those between the ages of 16 and 53 from Tul Karm and Nablus; paving a new road to a Jewish settlement; preventing a Palestinian family's return to its West Bank home; cutting off another home from its village and lands via the advanced separation barrier; preventing family visits to prisoners. There is no end to these damages; one book could not contain them all.

When it suits him, the Israeli is part of the collective. Therefore, every terror attack and Katyusha are aimed "against the Jewish people" - which, of course, always authorizes Israel to embark on punishment campaigns that are defined as existential war. And when it suits him, the Israeli denies his partnership in the collective, in the occupation machinery to which he is a partner. He ignores the inevitable implications of the machinery that controls, in an authoritarian way, the lives of 3.5 million people who did not elect it (the Palestinian Authority was from the outset a fiction of government, with no authority).

On the one hand, the Israeli who "doesn't intend" cuts himself off from the Israeli occupation and colonialism machine, and exempts himself from the responsibility for the intention to harm Palestinian civilians, an intention that is inherent in the very existence of an occupation machinery. And on the other hand, he cuts the Palestinian response off from the existence of the occupation machine: After all, they as individuals and as a collective "intended to harm civilians," and this because of their eternal essence as Muslims, as Arabs - which is independent of us.


4. Who Really Won the War?
Analysis: Everyone is claiming victory. But there's a lot more left of Hizballah's fighting ability than Israel and the U.S. had hoped. And the cease-fire may just be a temporary time-out
By TONY KARON

When wars end inconclusively, victory is always in the eye of the beholder. So it should come as no surprise that since the Lebanon cease-fire went into effect Monday morning, everyone from Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and President Bush to Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the leaders of Syria and Iran have been broadcasting competing claims of victory. Weighing those claims, however, requires measuring the war's outcome against the initial objectives defined by the different sides, and comparing their positions after a month of fighting to what they were before Hizballah seized two Israeli soldiers on July 12.

Scoring the Truce

The fighting ostensibly triggered by the soldiers' capture has left hundreds of Lebanese killed — mostly civilians, although Hizballah and Israel dispute the number of fighters slain — almost 1 million displaced and Lebanon's economy shattered; it has left 118 Israeli soldiers dead in combat and 39 civilians killed by Hizballah rocket barrages that fell in Israeli cities until the last hours of the month-long war, and forced as many as 1 million Israelis to spend much of that month living in bomb shelters. And yet, as the guns go silent, those two Israeli soldiers remain captives of Hizballah.

Their fate will be settled later, probably in negotiations between Israel and the Lebanese government on behalf of Hizballah, and the resultant deal will inevitably involve some kind of prisoner exchange. The soldiers' fate appears unlikely, however, to hold up the cease-fire. Within days, Lebanese Army troops (eventually numbering 15,000) will begin moving into southern Lebanon, later supported by a beefed-up U.N. peacekeeping force (which will also number 15,000), as Israel vacates the area.

What Israel Wanted; What Israel Got

While the truce certainly restricts Hizballah's military activities in southern Lebanon, it falls substantially short of the initial Israeli goal of crushing Hizballah as a military entity and prompting the rest of Lebanese society to turn against the organization because of the destruction by Israel that its actions provoked.

But not only has Hizballah survived very much intact as a military force; it was able to inflict substantial military and civilian casualties on Israel right until the truce came into effect. Most important, talk of preventing Hizballah's "return" is moot, because it was never actually driven from southern Lebanon, where many of its fighters remain active despite the presence of some 20,000 Israeli troops in their midst.

Who Will Disarm Hizballah?

Certainly Hizballah is voluntarily abiding by the cease-fire, but it is doing so very much on its own terms. Not only is it refusing to even discuss disarming right now, it appears to be reaching an agreement with the Lebanese government under which it would refrain from displaying its weapons in southern Lebanon and effectively keep them hidden.

Israel is looking to a speedy deployment of Lebanese and international forces. The Lebanese Army will likely be there first — it could take weeks or even months for an international force to be deployed in anything more than symbolic numbers — and it will formally take possession of the areas vacated by withdrawing Israeli forces. But the Lebanese Army, whose forces in the south have traditionally been on good terms with Hizballah, and whose fighting forces are almost half Shi'ite, is unlikely to try and forcibly disarm Hizballah. France — which is slated to lead the U.N. force and be its major troop-contributor with some 5,000 men — has said the same thing.

Troubles for Olmert - and the U.S.

It would be an understatement to say that Olmert's claims of victory have not exactly resonated with Israelis. It's abundantly clear to Israelis that an exercise designed to demonstrate the brutal efficiency of Israel's military deterrent against violent challenges has accomplished much the opposite, with Hizballah's performance emboldening Israel's enemies — from Gaza to Tehran.

That's bad news also for the Bush Administration, whose fantasies of leading an Arab front against Hizballah and Iran collapsed under pressure from Arab allies — Lebanon foremost among them — for an immediate cease-fire. The U.S. suffered diplomatically for its support of Israel's campaign — and may have made its work in Iraq that much more difficult — and was forced to settle for something less than the emphatic victory over Hizballah it had expected.

Indeed, the outcome has done so little to alter the basic strategic geography of Lebanon and the wider region that it's hard to envisage this truce as the first step towards a comprehensive regional peace. Right now, it looks more like a time-out.


5. Israel needs a purge -- by Bradley Burston (from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

War, like all obscenities, breeds perversion.

Much as we have grown to know war, we were still shocked by the perversity of the one man whose job it is in wartime to most directly inspire nobility, unity of purpose, trust, sensitivity to comrades, reasoned judgment under fire and, above all, focus.

The blood had not yet dried on Israel's side of the border with Lebanon. Eight soldiers lay dead, two others kidnapped across the footprint strip and the tripwire fence and the concertina wire and the chain link, into Hezbollah's heartland in Lebanon.

Barely three hours had passed. Israel's senior elected officials and its highest ranking military planners held emergency consultations over a declaration of war against Hezbollah. At some point, however, the mind of the nation's top soldier was elsewhere.

During a recess, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz contacted his bank in Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Center and sold a portfolio of investments worth NIS 120,000.

So this is how it ends. Not with a bomb, but with a day trade.

Just Sunday night, Halutz told a battery of Channel 10 reporters that he hadn't come into this world as army chief, and he wouldn't leave it in the post.

Already at the time, he knew something we didn't. That a month ago, at some point on a day that would seal the fate of thousands, he was looking beyond those 10 soldiers, their families, the welfare of a nation, the future of its neighbor.

At some point he would take the action that now stands as a symbol for everything that went wrong in the planning and direction of the war:

At that moment on July 12, the nation still believed that Dan Halutz' job was to save his country. At that moment, Dan Halutz believed that his job was to save himself.

It's not the money. The problem is not, strictly speaking, what he did. The problem is that he could be thinking about it, and acting on it, at a time like that.

This is all we needed to know about the war. Had we known what Halutz was doing when it started, we would have known how the war was going to end up.

Perhaps the most damning indictment against Halutz was his own explanation of the affair.

"It is true that I sold the portfolio on July 12, 2006, but it is impossible to link that to the war," Halutz said, adding, astoundingly:

"At the time I did not expect or think that there would be a war."

The next astounding element of this story is that Halutz will resist resigning, and that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz will put off firing him as long as they can, in order to avoid the appearance of having fired him over his conduct of the war, the very thing they should have done.

Tell that to bereaved families. Tell that to the maimed, the betrayed, those rendered homeless and fatherless and hopeless. Tell that to the reservists that put everything on the line, only to find they had inferior gear and not enough food and no water and contradictory orders that came in fits and starts from way above.

Tell them that Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz, whose hyperdrive ambition propelled them into positions for which they were unqualified, have shown themselves unworthy of office but unwilling to consider the consequence.

Tell them that, left to their own devices, they will stay in office as long as they can, not as long as they should.

We have seen Olmert, Peretz, and Halutz tested, and we have seen them fail us. We have seen that, where some have greatness thrust upon them, others let it slip through their unsure grasp.

There is no reason to believe that they intend to do anything about this on their own. Now it is time for the people of this country to look elsewhere. To find leaders.

For years, what this country needed from its government, was stability. After this war, what Israel needs is the opposite.

Israel needs a purge. Israel needs a new government. It needs real leaders, and soon.

There was a time when self-made statesmen - unlikely, ungainly, but superbly able to rise to the occasion - led the nation the hard way, by putting the nation first.

Leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, who, in envisioning the state and forging peace with Arab neighbors, displayed vision far beyond many of their political peers.

Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Rabin were realists who took wing and succeeded because they were under the illusion that they were dreamers.

Our present leaders have shown themselves to be pipe dreamers who failed because they were under the illusion that they were realists.

The moment the smoke of battle cleared this week, it became clear that the purge that Israel sorely needs had already begun. Soon after the Halutz investment affair became public knowledge on Tuesday, it was disclosed that two senior cabinet members face the possibility of indictment, one for allegations of election-related bribery and perjury, the other over suspicions of sexual harassment of a government employee.

We've known for too long that our obscenity of a political system breeds perversion. We've known that in allowing corruption to replace sacrifice, in fostering the personal gain of politicians over the common good, we allowed ourselves to be corrupted as well.

Now we're paying the price. Now, we can also see that it's time to invest in the national future, and that the time is not a resource we can count on.

We have to start now. And a purge is as good a place as any.


6. The pitfalls of machismo -- by Dan Rabinowitz (from Israel's Haaretz Daily

The second Lebanon War began with an impulsive spasm by the Israel Defense Forces - an overreaction that killed civilians and severely damaged civilian infrastructure. This move exacted, and will continue to exact, a heavy strategic price: It severely impaired the chances of freeing the Middle East of the threat of an Iranian revolution.

Since 1973, Israel has not succeeded in providing military solutions to geopolitical questions. The 1978 Litani Operation and 1982 invasion of Lebanon did not lead to security for the north. The Palestinians in the territories, despite the thousands of dead, the destruction and subjugation that two intifadas have brought upon them, have refused to reconcile themselves to the occupation, and are instead strengthening Hamas. The IDF is incapable of beating them.

However, this reality has not yet sunk into the consciousness of our generals, men of the old school who were educated in the spirit of the slogan that what cannot be done with force can be done with more force. The arrogant idee fixe of 1973, which held that the Arabs' defeat in 1967 had destroyed their desire to fight, did not disappear with the Agranat Report. It is still here, wrapped in modern phrases such as "searing their consciousness" and "restoring deterrence." Its prophets stubbornly ignore the fact that if anything has been seared into the Arabs' consciousness in any of these cases, it is only hatred for Israel and its addiction to force.

The parade of generals who recently trotted out their battered theories of consciousness-searing and deterrence looks like a pathetic, nostalgic outburst by elderly men longing for their youth, when they, and Israel, were young and just. In practice, only Egypt and Jordan, which received something in return for peace agreements, are not currently threatening Israel.

The zenith of Israel's intoxication with force - the late 1960s - corresponds with the period when IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz's generation was growing up. This is a generation that lives in constant fear that its achievements will not match those of the previous generation of generals. Instead of internalizing the limits of force, they have a tendency to give in to the macho impulse to compete with their parents' generation, thereby warping their judgment.

Granted, the fact that soldiers were killed and abducted pained the IDF. But perhaps a limited military response along the border would have been better? Hezbollah would apparently have responded by launching rockets, and then it would have been possible to attack the organization - but only it - in other areas of Lebanon. At the same time, a sensitive eye should have been kept on the decisive question over dealing with any popular movement: the level of public support it enjoys in its own country, its region and worldwide.

A sophisticated mixture of a lot of diplomacy with a little fighting could have led to Hezbollah's isolation. Instead, the IDF brass, followed by the government, chose to assume the role of the neighborhood madman and embark on a campaign of thuggish craziness whose damages are increasingly becoming clear.

As always in the Arab world, the party at which Israel directed the most force was the one that ultimately emerged the most strengthened. The enormous quantity of bombs that Israel dropped on Hezbollah turned its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and his deceptive ideology into icons of Arab unity and righteous resistance, and gave Iran important achievements in its struggle to undermine the legitimacy of moderate Arab regimes.

The IDF's overreaction in the first few days of the war will eventually be investigated, but whoever does this must not hesitate to analyze personal factors as well. Of all of Israel's generals, Dan Halutz appears the most skilled in one of the basis talents that Israeli men nurture from childhood: camouflaging the emotional and psychological elements of their actions. This humorless man, utterly lacking in nuance, who feels nothing when a bomb is released from the belly of his plane - and who even found time on the first day of the war to sell his stocks - recently said of himself that he is unaware of Israel's Lebanon trauma. The statements he made at the beginning of the war to cover his rear - that "the war's aims are defined by the political echelon" - succeeded in silencing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz for two critical weeks. The result was sweeping approval for a strategy of one-ton bombs that ignored the broader geopolitical picture that the general refused to see.

The campaign that Israel is waging against Hezbollah, as a forward outpost of Iran, is too important to leave to the generals. It has a chance only if Israel can succeed in building coalitions, both in the Middle East and beyond. And this will require a deep human understanding, free of ego and the intoxication of force.