First
drafts of history make strange bedfellows. Sayyid
Hasan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hizballah,
claimed a “strategic, historic victory” when
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 ushered in
a very belated “cessation of hostilities” in
Lebanon and Israel on August 14. Indeed, grumbled
the Israeli right and its backers in Washington,
Israel did not prevail in its month-long campaign
to “degrade” the Shi‘i movement’s
military strength into insignificance—and
so Nasrallah’s claim was not unjustified.
The war “ended in a tie,” wrote Charles
Krauthammer in the August 18 Washington Post, “and
in this kind of warfare, tie goes to the terrorist.”
There
is no irony to be found in the war itself, a
senseless bout of destruction that took 900–1,300
Lebanese and 39 Israeli civilian lives, turned
thousands of Lebanese homes into rubble and left
southern Lebanon strewn with unexploded cluster
munitions. Israel seized upon what should have
been a border skirmish to launch a long-planned
assault to knock out Hizballah’s arsenal
of rockets, concentrating its bombardment in
majority-Shi‘i areas to chasten the movement’s
core constituency, and blockading and besieging
the entire country to stoke antipathy for Hizballah
among Lebanon’s other confessional groups.
According to the Lebanese government, rebuilding
the bombed infrastructure will cost perhaps $3.5
billion, including $50 million to clean up an
oil slick created by an Israeli airstrike on
the Jiyya power plant. Damage estimates in Israel
also run in the millions. All this occurred with
the apparent aim of reestablishing Israel’s “deterrence” capability
and with such an obvious green light from Washington
that, as an unnamed Bush administration official
admitted to the Los Angeles Times, the
US is seen in the region as a “co-combatant.”
The
White House bet both that Israel’s collective
punishment of Lebanon would bolster the Lebanese
politicians seeking to disarm Hizballah and that
Israel’s attacks on the Shi‘i militia
would rob Iran of a weapon come the day of reckoning
over the nuclear program in the Islamic Republic.
The first bet, presumably informed by the neo-conservatives’ Orientalist
nostrums about Arabs and force, was callous in
the extreme—and also foolish. By standing
their ground against Israeli armor in southern
Lebanon, Hizballah’s guerrillas proved
they cannot be disarmed against their will by
any existing power in Lebanon. This fact, combined
with Hizballah’s well-organized relief
and reconstruction effort after the war, makes
the party seem more and more like “a state
within a non-state,” in the formulation
of Lebanese political scientist Amal Saad-Ghorayeb.
In Lebanon’s divided polity, these achievements
will win Hizballah allies, but also mobilize
its opponents. With its support for Israel’s
war, therefore, the Bush administration simultaneously
strengthened Hizballah’s arguments for
keeping its weaponry and sowed the seeds of deeper
sectarian discord, while exposing the Lebanese
government as ineffectual.
There
is ample reason to fear, in any case, that Resolution
1701 lays the groundwork for a continuation,
rather than a cessation, of hostilities. Most
strikingly, the resolution does not require a
full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and, with
its call upon Israel to halt only “offensive
military operations,” it leaves Israel
free to resume operations (like, according to
the US and Israel, the August 19 commando raid
in the Bekaa Valley) classified as defensive.
Krauthammer is only one commentator speaking
of “the now inevitable Round Two” by
which time Israel will have transcended the “exercise
in hesitancy” of Round One. Likud Party
leaders, sharing the wounded pride of much of
the Israeli public and seeing the near collapse
of the mainstream Israeli peace movement during
the war, hint at the same thing. Hizballah militiamen,
meanwhile, are not visible, but still present,
in the south. The fighters are likely to remain
even if the UN cobbles together the mandated
peacekeeping force to accompany the Lebanese
army in the south, if only to continue to press
Lebanon’s claim to the Shebaa Farms, a
well-watered and Israeli-occupied mountainside
that the UN and Israel regard as part of the
Golan Heights. The UN is to readjudicate the
claims to Shebaa, but according to a story in
the August 13 edition of Ha’aretz,
the US promised Israel that it does not have
to withdraw from the strip of land even if the
UN declares it part of Lebanon. Hence, and despite
great loss of life, the “rules of the game” on
the Israeli-Lebanese border may not be altered
much at all. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
is staring at something very similar to the “status
quo ante” whose return was so “untenable” that
Lebanon had to burn for a month.
The
White House’s second bet—about Iran—was
based on the notion that Hizballah takes its
every step on orders from Tehran, including the
July 12 cross-border raid that Israel employed
as its casus belli. After the war began, this
notion permeated American media coverage so rapidly
that no one paused to ask for proof. As the bombs
and rockets flew in July and August, each of
the big three American dailies featured front-page
analysis purporting to show that Washington’s “weak
hand” (Los Angeles Times) in Middle
East diplomacy had so “sharply curtailed
US maneuvering room” (Washington Post)
as to leave Rice’s “hands tied” (New
York Times) in her dilatory attempts to arrange
a ceasefire. The main evidence in each story
was the Bush administration’s refusal to
talk to counterparts in Tehran and Damascus,
who, by the newspapers’ unwritten assumptions,
could command Hizballah to defuse its Katyushas.
So
it was intriguing, to say the least, to read
the after-action assessment, based on a fact-finding
trip to Israel, by Anthony Cordesman, the epitome
of Establishment respectability in matters Middle
Eastern. Buried in the middle of Cordesman’s
report is this section: “No serving Israeli
official, intelligence officer or other military
officer felt that Hizballah acted under the direction
of Iran or Syria.” Apart from the harsher
light this judgment throws on Israel’s
proclamations of existential peril, are we to
believe that Israeli officials did not share
their feelings with their opposite numbers in
Washington?
If
Rice’s hands were tied, it was by an executive
who not only declined to play Washington’s
strong hand with Israel to effect a ceasefire,
but also sent bunker-busting ordnance to Israel
on the same day his chief diplomatic emissary
departed for the Levant. President George W.
Bush, buttressed by Vice President Dick Cheney
and his national security staff, saw in Israel’s
overweening retaliation a chance to humble US
adversaries in the region as US-occupied Iraq
slipped deeper into civil war and, with US approval,
Palestine groaned under a siege of its own. Having
identified the US with the goals of the war,
Bush was obliged to state after passage of Resolution 1701
that “Hizballah suffered a defeat in this
crisis,” a remark that elicited predictable
jeers from Tehran and Damascus (and caustic complaints
from neo-conservative circles in a closer capital
city).
It
comes as no surprise that the Bush administration
would dissemble and deceive to justify and claim
victory in a war it wanted. The more disquieting
realization, confirmed rather than sparked by
the Lebanon conflagration, is that the administration
still believes the Middle East can be shaped
to its liking through the naked display of military
superiority. This belief bespeaks a lack of cognitive
skills more worrisome than the profusely illustrated
contempt for international law. The frightening
possibility that the White House intended Israel’s
attempted “defanging” of Hizballah
as a prelude to military strikes on Iran cannot
be dismissed.
