[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: NYRB: A New Middle East [+War Within War]

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includes: Feature: War Within War

NYRB: A New Middle East continues...

The conflict is no longer about achieving
a specific objective—releasing a soldier, say, or
capturing defined territory. It is about something
more intangible, and so more serious: establishing
one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the
game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may
subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

—August 24, 2006

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The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 14 • September 21, 2006

Feature

War Within War

By Max Rodenbeck

1.

There are many ways to read the latest war in Lebanon.
It may rightly, for instance, be seen as a proxy war,
a nasty skirmish at the margins of a strategically
bigger struggle. Like those cold war subconflicts in
Africa, Indochina, and Central America, it pits
adversaries equipped, ideologically inspired, and
goaded by more powerful patrons. In this case, the
patrons, waiting in the wings to see how their weapons
and tactics performed, and hoping to frighten their
bigger foes while limiting losses to themselves, are
Iran and America, each using a pampered, martially
minded client to defend against perceived threats to
their interests in the region.

For America's leaders, Hezbollah represents not just
the long arm of Iran's Islamic Republic, a hostile
Shia power which has, since its inception, funded,
trained, and armed the Lebanese Shia group. It also
represents a form of what George Bush has taken to
calling Islamic fascism. In other words, making war
against Hezbollah is seen as a natural adjunct to the
wider war against Islamist terrorism. Defeating it can
only be good for America, and good for the vaguely
defined cause of holding the Middle East within the
international system that American power has for so
long underpinned. So it is that America lent its
diplomacy not to stopping the fighting as soon as
possible, but to providing an umbrella for Israel to
"finish the job" of crushing Hezbollah.

To Iran's leaders, and particularly to the current
administration of religious conservatives whose main
support base lies with such ideologically zealous
institutions as the security services and Republican
Guard, Hezbollah is more than a like-minded
organization deserving of support. It is also a
watchdog for the Islamic Republic's perceived mission
of protecting itself, and the wider region, from
American domination. Hezbollah's soft-spoken and
charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has himself
indicated that Iran sees his party, and especially its
rocket arsenal, as a deterrent against possible
Israeli or American aggression aimed, for instance, at
disabling Iran's nuclear program.

Hezbollah serves another Iranian goal, too. Its
example of determined resistance to Israel and
passionate support for the Palestinian cause rallies
fellow Muslims to the notion of confrontation with,
rather than accommodation of, the "forces of
international arrogance." This model defuses, to some
extent, the growing tension between the Sunni and Shia
branches of Islam, as exemplified by the turmoil in
Iraq. In this way, it reinforces Iranian pretensions
to wider Islamic leadership, to the detriment of
"soft" rivals such as Saudi Arabia.

Yet just as plausibly, the fighting can be seen as
having been simply another round in the far older
struggle between Israelis and Arabs. It fits well into
the mold. As long ago as the early 1950s, "fedayeen"
groups (meaning those who sacrifice themselves), often
representing nonstate actors such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, launched pinprick raids on the nascent
Jewish state, which responded with savage reprisals
that typically targeted not fedayeen themselves but
Arab civilians as well as governments that the
Israelis accused of shirking the responsibility of
reining in troublemakers.

This cycle's most vicious turn came in the early
1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon and battered its
capital, Beirut, in an ultimately successful, if
brutal and costly, effort to chase out Palestinian
guerrillas. A decade later, following the Oslo peace
accords, many of the same fighters arrived in
Palestine itself under the leadership of Yasser
Arafat. But again, his inability, or unwillingness, in
the eyes of Israelis, to tame a new set of nonstate
actors led to large-scale Israeli reprisals, which in
turn stripped his government of legitimacy and
promoted the rise of more radical, more determined
parties such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Like those parties, Hezbollah was a product of
conflict. The cultlike intensity of its following was
spawned by bitter personal experience of Israeli
domination, not only under the direct military
occupation of a large swathe of south Lebanon, which
lasted between 1978 and 2000, but as a result of
frequent Israeli punitive raids, such as the 1996
"Grapes of Wrath" offensive that caused the slaughter
of 106 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge at a UN
peacekeeping base in the village of Qana. Such
memories have allowed Hezbollah to pose as the
protector not just of Shias but of Lebanon as a whole,
with the argument that its guerrilla force performs a
function that the weak Lebanese state and its
ill-equipped army are incapable of.

Whatever Israel's protests, Hezbollah's capture of two
Israeli soldiers, and killing of eight more, on July
12 was clearly a military operation, an act of
banditry perhaps, but not of "terrorism." The most
notorious incident associated with the group is the
1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which killed
241 US servicemen. But Hezbollah was not formally
founded until two years later. Its responsibility for
two deadly attacks on Argentina's Jewish community in
the early 1990s is highly likely, but has not been
definitively proven. Since then the group has cheered
suicide attacks in Israel and the Iraqi resistance,
but is not known to have taken part in international
terrorism. It condemned the September 11 attacks on
the United States and shuns Sunni extremist groups
such as al-Qaeda—with good reason, since such groups
are often virulently anti-Shia, and Hezbollah takes a
relatively enlightened view of issues such as women's
rights. Aside from its military branch, the party
fields twelve representatives in Lebanon's parliament
and one cabinet minister, and it runs an impressive
number of social services, from schools to hospitals
and orphanages.

Even so, from the Israeli perspective, the existence
of a potent nonstate force on its northern border has
been seen as an intolerable nuisance. This is
particularly so since it has been backed by one state,
Iran, whose leaders have declared a resolve to destroy
Israel, and by another hostile state, Syria, which has
used Hezbollah as a prod to remind the world that
despite peace deals with other neighboring states,
Israel remains in occupation of Syria's Golan Heights.

Iran and Syria, in other words, have long had an
interest in pushing Hezbollah to challenge Israel.
That interest has intensified of late. America's
intervention in Iraq is seen by the two as an
aggressive effort to weaken them by physically
sundering their twenty-five-year-long alliance. Both
have tried, in different ways and quite successfully,
to ensure that America burns its fingers in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Iran has grown increasingly concerned by
international pressure for it to stop, or at least
fully disclose, its nuclear program, while Syria's
government has grown increasingly frustrated by the
Bush administration's imposition of a diplomatic
freeze that has allowed Israel to spurn repeated
Syrian offers to resume negotiations over the Golan.

For Israel's part, while the continuing existence of a
last hot stretch of border has been an annoyance, the
growth of Hezbollah's offensive rocket capacity has
been seen as an unacceptable threat. Israel tried to
defuse it, via its superpower patron, with a Security
Council resolution—1559—passed in 2004 that demanded
the disarmament of all Lebanese militias. Lebanon's
delicate internal politics rendered the application of
Resolution 1559 impracticable, however, while in
Palestine, the election of Hamas to power and
continued unrest in Gaza, including rocket attacks on
Israel, raised fears of an emerging pan-Islamist
front. Following the kidnapping of a soldier on the
Gaza border in late June, Israel was hardly in the
mood to react mildly to Hezbollah provocations, as it
had sometimes in the past, releasing Lebanese and
Palestinian prisoners in exchange for smaller numbers
of Israelis. Hence the determination, once Hezbollah
launched its July 12 raid, to smash the pest
completely.

But the ongoing conflict in Lebanon can be understood
in yet another light, as the latest episode in
Lebanon's own civil war. That vicious,
fifteen-year-long conflict is generally held to have
ended in 1990, with the signing of the Taif Accords
that reapportioned power between the country's main
sects, and confirmed the role of neighboring Syria as
a final arbiter. Yet the accord left important strings
untied. While diminishing the dominance of Christians,
to reflect changing demographics and the failure of
Christian forces to unite during the civil war, it did
not fully account for the rise in power, numbers, and
ambitions of the long-deprived Shias, who had emerged
as Lebanon's largest single sect. It also left Israel
in control of a thick wedge of territory in the
largely Shia-populated south. This enemy occupation
legitimized an exception to the Taif rules by which
the main Shia resistance force, Hezbollah, remained
the only Lebanese militia allowed to retain its arms.

Two subsequent changes brought these weaknesses in
Lebanon's political arrangements to the fore. The
first was Israel's unilateral withdrawal from its
"security zone" in the spring of 2000. This move
enhanced Hezbollah's prestige, since the group's
relentless and skillful fighting was what prompted
Israel to cut its losses and go. Yet at the same time
it put into question, for other Lebanese, the party's
right to claim a legitimate monopoly of arms. This
question came into the open following a second change,
which was the withdrawal of Syrian troops, forced out
by the popular uprising that came in response to
Syria's suspected involvement in the assassination, in
February 2005, of Rafik Hariri, a Sunni Muslim
politician and billionaire who had emerged as
Lebanon's main postwar public figure. In the wake of
this unrest, an anti-Syrian coalition of parties known
as the March 14 movement captured the reins of power
in Beirut.

In the year since Lebanon's so-called Cedar
Revolution, the anomaly of Hezbollah's weaponry
emerged as the most dangerous and divisive issue in
the country's notoriously tricky politics. Lebanon's
1.2 million Shias tended to see the party's arms as a
guarantor of influence for their sect, which has
historically been the country's poorest and most
disenfranchised. Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druze,
by contrast, tended to view Hezbollah as both a tool
of Syrian and Iranian meddling and an obstacle to the
assertion of full control by the Lebanese state.

In the spring of 2005, Nasrallah had warned,
ominously, that he would "cut off any hand" that
reached for Hezbollah's weapons. A series of
assassinations targeting critics of the party, and of
Syria, looked to some like the carrying out of this
threat. To others, however, the killings were a
suitable reward for what they regarded as the
treachery of the traditional Lebanese political and
business elite, which, reasserting itself through the
March 14 movement in the wake of Syria's departure,
seemed intent on acting as a regional bridgehead for
Western influence.

Meanwhile, the necessary inclusion of a Hezbollah
minister, along with allied Shias, in the
sectarian-balancing coalition formed in the summer of
2005 by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora had the effect of
stymieing efforts at reform, such as a push to remove
the Syrian-installed president, Émile Lahoud. In a
belated attempt to break months of deadlock and to
contain the growing polarization, Siniora agreed to a
series of dialogues that brought together sectarian
leaders and prominent politicians. The talks made
progress on some issues, but the key question of
disarming Hezbollah, as called for by the Security
Council, was repeatedly postponed as too contentious.
A session to resolve the issue was at last scheduled
for mid-July, but the flare-up of war on July 12
preempted it.

The initial response of most non-Shias in Lebanon to
the Hezbollah kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers,
which sparked the war, was of fury, and of frustration
at their own impotence to prevent the party from
taking unilateral action that put the country as a
whole at risk. Some concluded that Iran had instigated
the attack, to distract attention from its nuclear
program. Others fingered Syria, on the grounds that it
feared being charged by UN investigators into the
Hariri assassination. As a result, quite a few
Lebanese quietly cheered as the bombs began to fall.
At last, it was whispered, the political playing field
would be leveled. The Shia party would be brought to
heel, and its revolutionary zeal, culturally as well
as politically jarring to many Lebanese, would be
muted. A foreign army, and the vaunted and powerful
Israeli one at that, would eliminate the last
remaining nonstate actor of the civil war.

But such schadenfreude would largely dissipate as the
scale and mercilessness of Israel's vengeance became
clear.

2.

The actual eruption of fighting marked a point of
convergence among a range of different pressures and
motivations, most of them extraneous to the causes
cited by the belligerents. Israel claimed it was
fighting to free the two captured soldiers. Hezbollah,
for its part, has long declared its casus belli to be
the desire to free Lebanese prisoners in Israeli
jails, and to liberate a tiny patch of hillside known
as Shebaa Farms.

Many in the Muslim and Arab worlds are under the
impression that Israel holds dozens of Lebanese
"hostages." It certainly used to, but nearly all were
released in previous exchanges. Before the fighting,
Israel held precisely two known Lebanese prisoners in
Israel, along with a possible third, a fisherman who
disappeared at sea and whom Hezbollah asserts is a
captive. One of the prisoners, Samir Kuntar, is
serving multiple life sentences for murdering a father
and his daughter back in 1979, before Hezbollah's
founding, when he took part in a raid by Palestinian
guerrillas. The other is an Israeli citizen of
Lebanese origin, sentenced as a Hezbollah spy. In
other words, these "hostages" are, under international
law, not prisoners of war but simple criminals. 

The land issue is equally tenuous. It is true that
some Sunni Muslim residents of the Lebanese village of
Shebaa, on the slopes of Mount Hermon, hold title
deeds to orchards in what is now the
Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. But old maps place
this land not in Lebanon but in Syria. Before wars
wracked the region, such distinctions mattered little
in this border zone of smugglers and goatherds.
Lebanon never raised the issue before Israel's
withdrawal in 2000. And Syria has, rather slyly, never
formally relinquished its title: "We find it useful to
be ambiguous" is what an adviser to the Syrian Foreign
Ministry once told me. Small wonder that when the
United Nations, following Israel's withdrawal, was
asked to draw a "Blue Line" delimiting Lebanon's
border, it placed Shebaa Farms on the outside.

Obviously it is not such relatively trifling issues
but the convergence of historical and geostrategic
imperatives that explains why, once started, the
conflict so quickly escalated, with Hezbollah lobbing
rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli bombs wreaking
far greater, if more systematic, destruction across
Lebanon. The intensity of the war took most people by
surprise, including, or so its leaders insist,
Hezbollah itself. "Of course there was tension on the
border," says Rasha Amir, a Beirut novelist and
publisher, and a secular Shia. "But no one thought
we'd get the full-blown, big-budget Hollywood
blockbuster."

Ms. Amir was lucky. Her family's 150-year-old
ancestral home is one of the few old structures in the
Dahiya, the densely crowded southern suburb of Beirut
that was haphazardly built by waves of Shia refugees
from successive wars, and has become Hezbollah's
firmest stronghold. Nearby streets were entirely
devastated, with dozens of ten- and fifteen-story
buildings compacted into ashen hills of rubble. Every
window in her house was blasted out, every wall
cracked, and every door flung off its hinges. But the
stone structure still stands, with a rare rose jasmine
climbing in the walled garden.

Many were not so lucky. A single bomb on July 13
erased the entire Akash family, including eight
chil-dren aged between three months and twelve years,
at the village of Doueir, near the busy Shia market
town of Nabatiyeh. The Akhras family, from Montreal,
met a similar fate. Like many émigré Lebanese, they
had recently built a summer villa in Lebanon with the
idea of giving the children a taste of life in the old
country. Unfortunately, it was in the border village
of Aitaroun. One week into their holiday, and three
days into the war, Israeli shells flattened the house,
killing ten people—three generations of the family.

One Akhras cousin, Dallal, who works as a head nurse
in a Beirut hospital, is the only member of the clan
not to have emigrated to Canada. Like the entire
population of the Dahiya— perhaps 300,000 people—she
fled her apartment there for safety. Trying to keep
her young girls occupied while living in a friend's
house in upscale West Beirut, she gave them crayons
and paper. Four-year-old Lin drew a picture of coffins
filled with blood. Eight-year-old Nadine drew a
beautiful house with a garden, but half in flames,
with an Israeli aircraft overhead. "Doesn't God say
you shouldn't kill children?" asks Nadine.

Miraculously, the bombing of the Maliban glass factory
at noon on July 19 killed only one person. The plant,
which makes jam jars and beer bottles, is one of
Lebanon's oldest and largest industrial enterprises.
Normally the shop floor, now a blasted heap of tangled
girders and mangled machines, would have been crowded
with workers at this time. Aurobindo Chowdhury, who
has managed the plant for its Anglo-Indian owners
since 1972, stopped production only two days before.
He told me it would cost as much as $70 million to get
the place working again. In the meantime 380 employees
are out of a job.

Many Lebanese remain puzzled by the strategic thinking
behind a month-long aerial campaign that killed
approximately 1,287 people, injured 4,054, severed
three quarters of the country's roads and bridges,
smashed some fifty factories, and left an estimated
100,000 people homeless. But one goal was nearly
achieved by the last days of fighting. Aside from the
general infrastructural damage and occasional
effectiveness at hitting probable rocket-launching
sites, as well as at clobbering Hezbollah targets that
ranged from its main offices in the Dahiya suburb to
party-run village orphanages, clinics, and schools,
the bombing did succeed in displacing some nine tenths
of Lebanon's estimated 1.2 million Shias. Touching
nearly every concentration of Shias in the country,
the nine thousand air strikes emptied not just the
Dahiya and the southern borderlands. Shia villagers
even in the northern Bekaa Valley, fifty miles from
the front, also found it wise to seek shelter in
public schools, stadiums, and private homes across the
Sunni Muslim, Christian, and Druze- dominated regions
of the country.

This Israeli campaign appears to have had two
purposes. One was psychological: underlining the fact
that Hezbollah had failed to fulfill its role as a
protector of even its own people, the Shia, let alone
of Lebanon as a whole. The other was military: to
clear the south Lebanon "fighting box" of civilians,
so as to allow the Israeli army to make use of its
heaviest antipersonnel weaponry without fear of bad
publicity. In the very last hours of the war, Israel
does seem to have saturated parts of the border
landscape with cluster bombs. But either its army was
given too little time and leeway or the technique was
inefficient. The final twenty-four hours of fighting
saw Hezbollah firing its single largest daily volley
of rockets, some 250, at northern Israel. Many were
shot from positions that had been repeatedly bombed,
often within sight of Israel's border.

In fact, aside from destroying much property and
frightening large numbers of people out of their
homes, Israel's entire month-long campaign appears to
have been singularly ineffective. This was a classic
asymmetric war, pitting a large, highly mechanized,
and modern army, with hugely greater firepower and
full control of the skies, against a few thousand foot
soldiers. Yet Israel's forces barely managed to probe
a few miles across the frontier, often feinting and
then withdrawing under heavy fire. When the cease-fire
whistle blew after thirty-three days of fighting, they
had secured only a single salient on the Litani River,
which lies less than twenty miles from the border.

It is true that Hezbollah's offensive weapons were not
especially effective, either. The four thousand or so
rockets it fired killed just forty-one civilians, a
third of them "Israeli Arabs," i.e., Muslim
Palestinians. But the guerrillas' skillful use of
light field weapons, such as mortars, shoulder-fired
rockets, and laser- and wire-guided antitank
missiles,[*] appears to have rendered Israel's
lumbering Merkava ("Chariot") tanks pretty useless.
Israel also seems to have shied from applying close
air support, such as the attack helicopters that
advanced armies typically wield to great effect in
counterinsurgency warfare. Most likely this reflected
a fear of being shot down.

Israel's loss of 116 soldiers was not large as major
wars go. Hezbollah claims to have lost a smaller
number of front-line fighters, although many more
troops associated with Hezbollah may have been lost as
well. It is difficult to judge, since rearguard
reserves are typically dressed as civilians. Israel's
claim to have destroyed up to 70 percent of the
guerrillas' longer-range rocket launchers may also be
correct. But the uncomfortable fact for Israel is that
whereas Hezbollah killed two Israeli soldiers for
every Israeli citizen it killed, Israel's ratio in
inflicting "collateral damage" was, at best, exactly
the reverse.

3.

As a cease-fire came into effect on August 14, every
party tried to claim victory. Israel's prime minister,
Ehud Olmert, asserted that the fighting had "changed
the rules of the game" in the region. President Bush
stated flatly that Hezbollah had lost; that this was a
victory for "freedom" and a blow to "state sponsors of
terrorism" such as Iran and Syria. Yet as his
supporters set off fireworks, and passed out both
sweets and posters proclaiming "a Victory from God"—a
pun on Nasrallah's name, which literally means God's
Victory—the Hezbollah chief went on television to
declare what he called "a strategic triumph." Syria's
president, Bashar Assad, was even more bullish,
trumpeting a defeat both for American plans for a "new
Middle East" and for Siniora's government, which he
accused of being a stooge for America and a traitor to
the Arabs. Iran went furthest of all, declaring public
transport in the capital, Tehran, free for a day in
celebration.

Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the basic
rules for the ceasefire, appeared on paper to meet
Israel's main demand, by insisting that Lebanon south
of the Litani River be secured solely by a joint force
from the United Nations and the Lebanese army. In
other words, Hezbollah's rocket arsenal would, as a
first step, have to be pulled back, eliminating the
threat to Israel of short-range missiles, and further
diminishing the threat of longer-range projectiles.

Yet this was a far cry from Israel's initially stated
objective of eliminating and disarming Hezbollah. More
troubling still, applying the agreement relied on a
number of shaky variables: the willingness of
Hezbollah and its patrons to relinquish their
cherished "deterrent" against the "Zionist Entity";
the untested ability of the Lebanese army, a scantly
armed conscript force with close ties, at both the
command and foot soldier level, to Hezbollah; and the
willingness of outsiders to insert troops into a
potentially volatile region. Most crucially, the peace
deal relied on the durability of the Lebanese
government, at precisely a moment when Hezbollah and
its supporters felt triumphantly immune to pressure.

As the leaflets it rained on Beirut made clear,
Israel's strategy was to pin the blame for war damage
on Hezbollah, so turning other Lebanese against the
party. It failed, as dramatically as have most
campaigns of persuasion-by-bombing in modern wars.
Support for Nasrallah was, of course, particularly
intense among the Shia, whose faith enshrines both
martyrdom and sacrifice: even in a pre-war poll they
expressed 96 percent backing for his party. Wartime
loss seems only to have intensified Shia identity with
the party. The day after the cease-fire, one reporter
found an old woman weeping amid the ruins of the
Dahiya. Puzzled on learning that her whole family, as
well as her house, had survived unscathed, the
reporter discovered that the cause of Umm Abbas's
grief was that she had not been able to sacrifice even
her home for "the Sayyed," a term of respect that
refers to Hassan Nasrallah's descent from the Prophet.
Such examples of cultish fervor reverberated across
the country, as hundreds of thousands of refugees
returned to shattered villages, and gaunt guerrilla
fighters stumbled out of their foxholes to be hailed
as heroes.

Yet many other Lebanese from across the country's
fractured spectrum, backed up by a vast chorus from
the wider Arab and Muslim worlds, now expressed
similar awe for the achievements of the Resistance.
After all, Israel had defeated combined Arab armies in
just six days in 1967. It had swept to Beirut within a
week in 1982. But now, a ragtag peasant force, armed
with little more than faith and a willingness to die,
had held the invader at bay for a whole month. Many
recalled what Hassan Nasrallah had said: "When the
people of this transient state lose confidence in
their legendary army, the end of this entity will
begin."

When the shy, soft-spoken, and turbaned Nasrallah,
with an occasional whimsical, ironic smile, now spoke
on television, silence fell across Arab capitals.
Chiding as "wooden-tongued" the members of the March
14 movement who had dared to hint that the time was
now ripe for Hezbollah to disarm, Nasrallah quietly
declared that in the light of the Resistance's
victory, such suggestions were immoral as well as
premature. His critics, he said, had sat in
air-conditioned rooms while the people suffered.

As in many of his speeches, Nasrallah counseled his
own followers to be patient and understanding. But
rather than reassuring his foes, the call was
understood by many Lebanese as an indirect threat to
release Hezbollah's street power, should any effort be
made to thwart the party's goals. It is a potent
threat, since no other party commands such mobilizing
force: in June, police largely stood by when Hezbollah
supporters rioted in Christian and Sunni quarters of
Beirut, in protest against a television satire in
which a bearded Shia cleric had vowed to "liberate"
Lebanese property in Dearborn, Michigan.

At this writing, most Lebanese who do not share
Hezbollah's triumphalism, and they are many, remain
pessimistic about the chances of taming the party.
"Lebanon is finished" is a refrain often heard in
private. The flight, during the war, of much of
Beirut's polyglot elite, and their replacement by a
crowd of destitute Shia refugees, offered to them a
brief vision of this famously cosmopolitan country
being transformed into a drab Islamist state. Harking
back to the civil war, some even whisper that it is
time to divide the country into sectarian cantons.

Yet as the scale of wartime damage to the country
becomes clear, more Lebanese may be emboldened to hold
Nasrallah to account for his role in the disaster, and
so to counterbalance his current popularity. Clever
formulas may be found for dealing with the arms issue,
for instance by categorizing the weapons as either
offensive (useless rockets) and therefore dispensable,
or defensive (highly effective antitank gear) and
therefore serviceable, perhaps by incorporating
Hezbollah's front-line force within the Lebanese army.
It is even possible that new constitutional mechanisms
can be devised to make possible an effective executive
branch while guaranteeing sectarian rights.

Lebanon, despite its divisiveness, is also a country
with extraordinary political resilience, largely built
on the unspoken understanding that no one group can
dominate the rest without serious bloodshed. Yet
resolving its troubles requires a degree of patience
and sensitivity that is poorly understood by outside
powers such as America and Israel, or Iran and Syria.
What they want is immediate results. One big danger is
that America pushes too hard, in the name of
"freedom," for Siniora's government to deliver up
Hezbollah. That could result in collapse. Another
danger is that Syria, fearing further isolation, and
the weakening of its connection with Hezbollah—which
may be likely if joint Lebanese army and UN patrols
block Syrian attempts to resupply the group with
arms—tries to sabotage the peace.

Evidently, like the background to the war, its outcome
also carries many-layered implications, for the
contest between an American-led "West" and Iran, for
the Arab–Israeli conflict, and for Lebanon's own
internal struggles. For the time being, Israel's
bungled offensive appears to have empowered the forces
opposed to it, and opposed to a regional Pax
Americana. That does not bode well for the future of
the Middle East, where what looms right now is a
wholesale rollback of "moderates" in favor of
chauvinistic Islamist nationalism.

Yet it is also, if only faintly, possible that
responsible foreign powers may act with wisdom, and
seize the real potential for change that lies within
this crisis. This is not the "opportunity" seized on
by George Bush at the war's onset to bash his favorite
bad guys, but rather the chance to push for a much-
wider-ranging regional settlement. This would, of
course, necessarily include addressing such issues as
Israel's continued occupation of the Golan Heights. In
other words, it would require engaging, rather than
demonizing, such unwholesome players as the
governments of Syria and Iran, as well as Hamas in
Palestine, that sadly troubled land that remains the
eye of the surrounding storm.

—August 24, 2006

Notes

[*] Most of these were advanced, Russian-made systems
supplied via Syria and Iran. Ironically, however, some
anti-tank gadgetry is likely to have been 1980s
vintage and American-made. The Reagan administration
plied Iran with TOW wire-guided missiles as part of
the Iran-contra boondoggle, a scandal which,
incidentally, implicated the current administration's
leading Hezbollah hawk, Elliott Abrams, the National
Security Council's Middle East policy chief. Iran may
have shipped these goods to Hezbollah.

—August 24, 2006

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