The 33-Day War
Hizbullah’s victory, Israel’s
choice
Helena Cobban
8 The
central tragedy of the war that raged for 33 days this summer
between Israel and Lebanon was the death of at least 1,000 Lebanese
and 39 Israeli civilians and the maiming of many hundreds more. Of
course, soldiers also died: Hizbullah killed 117 members of the
Israel Defense Forces, and the best estimate is that the IDF killed
somewhere between 150 and 170 Hizbullah fighters and 43 Lebanese
security-force personnel. Vital national infrastructure was also
destroyed, especially in Lebanon, where, according to the UN, Israel
destroyed 15,000 homes, 900 businesses, 77 bridges, and 31 utility
plants. In Israel, the level of physical destruction was far
lower.
All that destruction and suffering—and
for what? Two men stood at the center of the confrontation: in
Israel, Ehud Olmert, a relatively new prime minister who had never
had national-security responsibilities before, and in Lebanon,
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s secretary-general and a man
who, though 15 years Olmert’s junior, had spent almost his entire
adulthood perfecting the art of waging asymmetrical warfare against
Israel.
Neither of these protagonists craves
violence for its own sake. (My study of Hizbullah and the political
skills of Nasrallah was published in the April/May 2005 issue of
Boston Review.) Each was directing the forces at his command
in what he considered to be a rational pursuit of strategic
political goals. A careful examination of the course of the war
reveals that, at its core, it was about two central issues:
reestablishing the credibility of each side’s deterrent power and
achieving dominance over the government of Lebanon.
Both sides won the first contest. The
ceasefire that went into effect August 14 has proved remarkably
robust. Given that no outside force has been in a position to compel
compliance, that robustness must reflect the reemergence of an
effective system of mutual deterrence.
In the second contest, however,
Nasrallah has emerged the clear winner. Indeed, not only did Olmert
fail completely in his bid to persuade Beirut to crack down on
Hizbullah, but the destructive power that the Israeli air force
unleashed upon Lebanon significantly strengthened Hizbullah’s
political position.
This outcome should not be surprising.
The history of countervalue bombing—the strategic targeting of
cities and civilians rather than military sites—tells us that only
rarely does it effect sweeping political change. My mother had two
miscarriages in London during Hitler’s 1940–41 Blitzkrieg against
the city, and numerous others suffered far worse. But neither the
Blitz against London nor the Allied bombing of Dresden sapped the
defiance of those cities’ defenders. In Japan, the Allies’ repeated
firebombings of Tokyo were even more lethal, yet similarly
unsuccessful politically. It was only the considerably more shocking
and awful events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally persuaded
the emperor and his people to surrender.
In Israel, however, Olmert and his
chief of staff, General Dan Halutz, believed that strategic bombing
could turn Lebanon’s government and the majority of its people
against Hizbullah. Some reports indicate that Halutz reached this
conclusion after noting what he judged to be the U.S. Air Force’s
success in Serbia in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001. Perhaps, too,
Halutz overvalued air power because of his lengthy experience in the
air force, where he had been chief of the air staff before becoming
the first air-force officer appointed chief of the IDF’s overall
staff. And a prime minister and defense minister little versed in
strategic leadership may have been easily swayed by the advice of a
brainy-sounding senior military officer.
But whatever the reasoning behind
Olmert’s decision to launch a broad war against Lebanon, it ended up
serving him ill. He failed to bend the Lebanese government to his
will. He failed to secure the unconditional release of the two
soldiers whose capture by Hizbullah had triggered the war. And in
the months since the war’s end, while Nasrallah and his party have
been riding high, Olmert and his government have been in a serious
slump; controversy over the various tactical and strategic debacles
has paralyzed much of the IDF general staff; and Olmert’s primary
political project of undertaking a limited unilateral withdrawal
from the West Bank lies in tatters.
How did things go so horribly wrong for
Olmert? To understand this, we need to go back and trace some of the
key events and decisions of July 12, 2006, and the 33 days that
followed.
* * *
At around 9 a.m. on July 12, Hizbullah
launched two simultaneous operations across Lebanon’s border with
Israel. One was the infiltration of a small squad that captured two
IDF soldiers from a jeep-borne border-patrol unit, killing three
patrol members and wounding two more. Hizbullah’s goal was to
exchange the soldiers for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Similar
prisoner exchanges had been conducted a number of times in recent
years. In Gaza, militants from the fringe Popular Resistance
Committees had captured another IDF soldier on June 25 with the same
goal; he was still held captive.
Hizbullah’s second attack—undertaken as
a diversion from the first—was the launching of several rockets from
Lebanon toward two other IDF positions on the border. The strategy
worked. It took the local IDF commanders half an hour even to learn
about the ambush of the jeeps. Once they did, they sent a force of
tanks and armored personnel carriers into Lebanon in pursuit of the
group that was presumed to be holding the abducted soldiers. Around
11 a.m. a land mine destroyed one of these tanks almost completely,
killing its four crew members. It took the IDF many more hours—and
one more soldier’s life—to recover the damaged tank and the bodies
of the crew members.
Throughout the day Israeli air and
naval forces bombed bridges and other choke points along the routes
to the north that they thought the abductors might take. At some
point that day, too, the Olmert government decided to unleash a far
broader bombing campaign. That evening Olmert publicly declared that
the cross-border raid was “not a terror attack, but an operation of
a sovereign state without any reason or provocation … The Lebanese
government, which Hezbollah is part of, is trying to undermine the
stability of the region, and the Lebanese government will be
responsible for the consequences.”
This was a crucial declaration.
Olmert’s language distanced Israel’s actions from Washington’s
broader “war on terror” and invoked classic rules of war. (Later,
his discourse would shift back toward that of the global “war on
terror.”) And Olmert was declaring full-scale war against Lebanon,
even though its U.S.-backed prime minister, Fouad Siniora, had taken
pains to dissociate his government from Hizbullah’s actions.
That same day Israel’s military leaders
spelled out what this decision meant to them. Major General Udi
Adam, the head of the IDF’s Northern Command, said, “Once it is
inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate—not just southern Lebanon,
not just the line of Hezbollah posts.” And Halutz told Israel’s
Channel 10, “If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn
Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”
On July 13 Israel bombed Beirut’s Rafiq
Hariri International Airport, Lebanese air-force bases in the Beqaa
Valley and northern Lebanon, and other targets, killing 44
civilians. (Two Israelis were killed by Hizbullah rockets that day.)
On July 14, the IDF bombed Hassan Nasrallah’s home in south Beirut
and many civilian targets around the country. On July 14, too,
Olmert spelled out three concrete demands for the Beirut government:
the unconditional return of the abducted soldiers, the cessation of
Hizbullah’s rocket attacks, and the full implementation of UN
Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for the disarming of
Hizbullah. In response to Siniora’s increasingly anguished pleas for
a ceasefire, Olmert insisted that Israel would agree to a ceasefire
only if all three demands were met. Winning Beirut’s full commitment
to the disarming of Hizbullah was clearly a central aim of Olmert’s
war.
But there was another. Many influential
members of the Israeli political right had been arguing for some
years that Israel needed to reestablish the credibility of Israeli
military deterrence, not only with Hizbullah but throughout the
region. They argued that Ehud Barak’s government’s unilateral
withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s decision to pull
troops and settlers out of Gaza unilaterally in 2005 had badly
damaged this deterrent capability. On and after July 12, these
individuals vociferously advocated the destruction of Hizbullah’s
military capacity in Lebanon as a lesson to potential foes
everywhere. The Olmert government apparently embraced this broader
goal. When the American strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman visited
Israel later in the war, “restoring the credibility of Israeli
deterrence” was one of the five war goals he heard enunciated by an
unnamed top official.
Nadav Morag, a former security aide to
Ariel Sharon, described this goal succinctly in The Christian
Science Monitor on July 20: “The targeting of roads and bridges,
power plants, and, in the case of Lebanon, ports and airports, as
well as the cutting off of Gaza and Lebanon from the outside world,
is … designed to illustrate Israel’s overwhelming military might. It
must convince not only Hizbullah and the Palestinian groups that
they should abandon their attacks on Israel, but also send a broader
regional message that proxy wars against Israel executed by Iran and
Syria will no longer be tolerated.”
Morag stressed that Israel needed time
to succeed. “Keeping the international community at bay” was
crucial, he argued. That job was eagerly taken on by the Bush
administration: President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and other
administration officials argued for three long weeks that it would
not be “helpful” or “appropriate” to seek an immediate ceasefire. On
July 20, another former Sharon security aide (and former Mossad
director), Efraim Halevy, told an interviewer, “We’ll have at least
another eight days of fighting.”
With the Bush administration (and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair) blocking Security Council calls
for an immediate ceasefire, the bombing and destruction continued
inside Lebanon. They continued inside Israel as well, since the IDF
was never able to suppress Hizbullah’s rocketeers.
Hizbullah continued to rain around a
hundred rockets a day onto Israel’s northern borderlands and as far
south as Haifa. This bombardment had significant political effects.
First and foremost, it greatly angered Jewish Israelis, and thus
gave the government much stronger popular support for the war. Many
Israelis had for a long time seen their country’s earlier military
interventions in Lebanon as more or less their Vietnam. In 1982 and
again in the late 1990s, large Lebanon-related peace movements grew
strong enough to sway official policy: one persuaded Barak to
undertake the unilateral pullout from Lebanon in 2000.
In July 2006, however, few Jewish
Israelis opposed Olmert’s war. From July 12 through early August,
the veteran Peace Now movement remained noticeably split, with many
of its leaders and supporters—including such luminaries as the
novelists Amos Oz and David Grossmann—expressing continued support
for the war. As for the moderate Labor Party, it had been coopted by
the government since Olmert first formed it in early May. Labor
leader Amir Peretz—Olmert’s defense minister, despite his lack of
experience in national-security affairs—was an essential member of
the war cabinet.
Hizbullah’s rocketing of northern
Israel also gave Olmert an ongoing casus belli with some
validity. It can be seen as having prolonged the war—though from its
early days Nasrallah was also calling loudly for a rapid,
reciprocal, and unconditional ceasefire. Why, then, had he ordered
that first provocative raid against Israel on July 12, and why did
he continue rocketing Israel even after it was evident that these
continuing attacks were prolonging the war and the suffering of
Lebanese people?
On August 27, in a lengthy interview
with Mariam al-Bassam, the political editor of Lebanon’s liberal New
TV station, Nasrallah answered the first of these questions. He
denied that the abduction of the IDF soldiers had been particularly
provocative, saying that Hizbullah had launched even larger-scale
operations against Israel since the Israeli withdrawal from South
Lebanon in 2000; but those operations had not sparked anything like
the furious response of July 12. (Nasrallah saw no need to remind
his mainly Lebanese audience that Israel had violated the recognized
border between the two countries many hundreds of times since 2000.)
He said that it was only in the days after July 12 that Hizbullah
learned that the Israelis had already been preparing to launch—with
substantial help from the Bush administration—a massive “knockout
blow” against Hizbullah in late September or October. It was this
attack that Olmert had launched. Nasrallah said that Hizbullah’s
15-person leadership “did not see any risk, even one chance in a
hundred, that the abduction operation would lead to a war on this
scale.”
In the event, Nasrallah said, Olmert’s
actions had proved lucky for Hizbullah, since they reduced the
degree of strategic surprise and forced the IDF to fight the big war
before the preparations had been completed. There is indeed some
evidence that the campaign was undertaken too hastily. Yoram Peri, a
seasoned analyst of Israeli military strategy, has written, “This
military option was discussed in the cabinet for less than three
hours, was not countered by any diplomatic option and was approved
in a conceptual void. Moreover, once a path of action was adopted,
something went terribly wrong in making and implementing
decisions.”
Bassam did not press Nasrallah on why,
once the counterattack had started, Hizbullah continued launching
almost daily barrages of rockets into Israel. But in numerous public
utterances during the war Nasrallah said that Hizbullah would
continue to launch rockets against civilian population centers
inside Israel so long as Israel did the same in Lebanon. He
therefore seemed as anxious as Olmert to reestablish the credibility
of his forces’ deterrent power. He also seemed eager to demonstrate
the continued existence, discipline, and effectiveness of
Hizbullah’s command structure. On July 31, after Kofi Annan called
for a 48-hour “humanitarian ceasefire” in response to the IDF’s
killing of 28 civilians in Qana, Hizbullah complied nearly
completely, though Israel did not. On August 2, the rocketing
resumed, and it continued until the August 14 ceasefire went into
effect. When it did, the rockets stopped completely, and none have
been launched against Israel since.
* * *
Time—and in particular, the timing of
the ceasefire—was an important dimension of the war. At first the
Lebanese government was the party most eager for a ceasefire.
Hizbullah wanted one, too—provided it was unconditional. And Israel
and the United States were working hard to block that possibility.
Over time, however, Israel’s calculus changed. Olmert and Halutz
came to understand that airborne and other standoff weapons could do
nothing on their own to suppress Hizbullah’s rockets. (Hizbullah’s
anti-ship missiles kept the Israeli navy much farther away from the
Lebanese coast than it had been during previous big battles there.)
Yehuda Ben-Meir has written that “even by the end of the first week
of fighting it became clear that … deploying ground troops to
southern Lebanon was inevitable.” That had not been part of Halutz’s
plan, nor was it something that Olmert or anybody else in the
political echelon was keen to do given the troubled history and
tragic memories of earlier ground deployments in Lebanon.
The IDF’s top commanders also
understood well by that time that their ground troops were ill
prepared to undertake successful offensive operations in Lebanon. As
early as July 13, the Maglans, a special-forces unit of the IDF, had
tried to enter the village of Maroun al-Ras, one kilometer north of
the border. But, as Uzi Mahnaimi wrote in The Sunday Times,
they ran into serious trouble:
“We didn’t know what
hit us,” said one of the soldiers, who asked to be named only as
Gad. “In seconds we had two dead … Evidently they had never heard
that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short
engagement with the Israelis … We expected a tent and three
Kalashnikovs—that was the intelligence we were given. Instead, we
found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of
tunnels.”
The next morning the Maglans were still
pinned down by Hezbollah fighters. The reports of the raid shocked
Halutz and Lieutenant General Udi Adam, who sent in reinforcements
from the Egoz brigade. Mahnaimi wrote, “Hours of battle ensued
before the Maglan and Egoz platoons were able to drag their dead and
wounded back to Israel … It was immediately obvious to everyone in
Tel Aviv that this was going to be a tougher fight than Halutz had
bargained for.” It took the IDF two more attempts, on July 22 and
July 26, before it could take even that small village. Meanwhile, on
July 21 the IDF announced its first large call-up of ground-force
reserves.
In Beirut, Hizbullah’s leaders had been
busy in politics as well as military affairs. On July 25, Siniora’s
cabinet —including its two Hizbullah members— announced unanimous
support for a seven-point plan that called for an immediate
ceasefire and included this as point four: “The Lebanese government
extends its authority over its territory through its own legitimate
armed forces, such that there will be no weapons or authority other
than that of the Lebanese state . . . ” The plan called for a
prisoner exchange under the auspices of the International Committee
of the Red Cross, Israel’s withdrawal to the international border,
and the return of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese to
their villages. On July 26, Siniora presented the plan at an
international conference in Rome. But the American government,
through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, continued to argue that
the time was not right for a ceasefire. (She and Bush still wanted
to force Hizbullah to disarm.)
In Israel, the call-up of reserves was
encountering difficulties. Uzi Mahnaimi quoted one reserve fighter
as saying, “We arrived at our depots only to find that our combat
gear had been opened and equipment given to regular soldiers . … The
equipment was, of course, never returned.” Once in the field, in
Lebanon, this solder recalled, “We had no fresh water as it was too
dangerous to ship it to us … I’m ashamed to admit we had to drink
water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah, and break into local
shops for food.” By July 30, after several indecisive and damaging
ground engagements inside Lebanon, the veteran Israeli strategic
analyst Zeev Schiff was writing that Rice, “needs military cards,
and unfortunately Israel has not succeeded to date in providing her
with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah and Lebanon under fire, all of
Israel’s military cards at this stage are in the form of two
Lebanese villages near the border that have been captured by the
IDF.” Meanwhile, the Israeli leadership had been scaling back its
war goals. Peretz had once vowed to “break” Hizbullah; now the
commanders in the field said that they merely wanted to “cripple” it
so that the Lebanese government could come in and disarm it.
Throughout late July and early August
Israel’s decision-making became increasingly shaky and riven by
disagreements. By August 6 the journalist Aluf Benn was reporting
that Olmert and Peretz “were at odds last night over the extent of
the Israeli ground offensive in Lebanon. Peretz favors expanding the
incursion as far as the Litani River, with the objective of
controlling the area from which the short-range rockets are fired at
Israel. He announced yesterday that he had instructed the army to do
so. Olmert, for his part, is not enthusiastic about the idea; he
feels that holding more ground in southern Lebanon will not solve
the problem of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range rockets.” Benn’s
colleague Amos Harel wrote, “The rush to reach the Litani is
controversial. Some officers fear that inadequately trained reserve
units will sustain heavy losses . . . In any case, Israel intends to
hold the security zone as a bargaining chip until a multinational
force arrives. The bargaining chip, however, could become a burden
if the troops remain in Lebanon for any length of time.”
As the debate continued in Israel, the
Bush administration finally moved toward the idea of a speedy
ceasefire. On August 6, Rice announced that she and her French
counterpart had reached agreement on a draft ceasefire resolution,
and said she was confident it could be adopted by the Security
Council “in the next day or two.” This draft called for Hizbullah to
cease its military operations completely and for Israel to cease
merely its “offensive military operations.” There was no demand that
Israel withdraw from the portions of Lebanon that it occupied. The
draft called explicitly for the disarmament of all armed groups in
Lebanon; and it described a plan whereby a second, follow-up
resolution, to be passed at an unstated date, would authorize the
deployment in Lebanon of a “UN-mandated force” (which might be a
force run by the UN or, as in Afghanistan, by NATO) that would
operate under an openly interventionist mandate. The draft called
for the unconditional release of the two captured IDF soldiers. But
it did not tag that demand as an “operational paragraph,” so it had
less than full force. By then the Bush administration, too, was
starting to scale back its demands.
Rice’s confidence that her draft would
be speedily adopted by the Security Council proved misplaced.
Siniora protested that he had not been consulted and that the draft
violated the terms of his government’s seven-point plan. Syria
protested, too, and numerous Security Council members, including
veto-wielders China and Russia, declined to support the U.S.-French
draft. Even the French backed away from it.
In Israel, high-level dithering
continued over whether there should be a large ground operation, and
if so, what kind. It had been no small matter, after all, that on
August 5 Peretz had, despite Olmert’s concerns, ordered a ground
incursion as far as the Litani. (Peretz probably took some advice in
his strategic decision-making from Infrastructure Minister Binyamin
Ben-Eliezer, a fellow member of the Labor Party and a career
military man who had commanded the northern front during Israel’s
first invasion of south Lebanon in 1978.) There were serious
divisions among the top brass in the military, too. On August 8
Halutz appointed his deputy, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, to take
command of the northern sector over the head of the sector’s
existing commander, Udi Adam.
In New York, diplomats at the United
Nations worked hard to find language for a ceasefire resolution that
would meet at least some of Siniora’s objections. The Lebanese
government had three main negotiating cards: under the principles of
sovereignty, its approval would be crucial to the success of any UN
peacekeeping force; the Lebanese people were winning global sympathy
for their battering by Israel; and Siniora’s government was
dominated by representatives of the pro-democracy “March 14”
movement that had surged into power just 15 months before. On August
11 at 8 p.m., the Security Council finally, and unanimously, adopted
a ceasefire resolution, number 1701.
Resolution 1701 met Siniora’s demands
in key respects. It embodied a speedy, single-step approach to the
deployment of additional peacekeepers, expanding the existing UN
force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, rather than recommending the creation of a
whole new force. It specified the Lebanese government’s retention of
key powers, including control over entry points into the country.
And it called on Israel to “withdraw all of its forces from southern
Lebanon in parallel” with the deployment of the Lebanese armed
forces and the expanded UNIFIL force. Resolution 1701 still included
the language Siniora had objected to earlier, that the “full
cessation of hostilities” would be based on “the immediate cessation
by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of
all offensive military operations.” It also still called for the
disarmament of “all armed groups” in Lebanon. Hizbullah, of course,
had already agreed to something close to this when it agreed to
point four of Siniora’s seven-point plan.
Although the Security Council
unanimously adopted Resolution 1701 that Friday evening, hostilities
still continued. On Saturday, Nasrallah and the Lebanese government
separately announced their acceptance of the ceasefire, though
Nasrallah said, “When the Israeli aggression stops, then the
reaction by the resistance will stop.” Shortly afterward Kofi Annan
announced that he had received the agreement of both Lebanon and
Israel that the ceasefire would go into effect at 8 a.m. local time
on Monday. In Israel Olmert said he “welcomed” the resolution, but
added that Israel would not halt its fire until the Israeli
government had met to endorse the resolution; and since it was
Shabbat, that would not happen for another day. But already, much
earlier on that Saturday morning, Israel’s national command
authorities had finally launched the big ground incursion they had
been threatening for weeks. This offensive tripled the number of IDF
ground troops inside Lebanon to 30,000. Deploying both by ground and
in large convoys of helicopters, they tried to reach the Litani
River at a number of points. The air force provided close air
support; but it also hit targets deeper in the Lebanese interior,
including power plants in Tyre and Sidon, a highway and several
other targets in the far north of the country, and an apartment
building in Baalbek in the northern Bekaa Valley.
The last-minute ground incursion soon
proved to be a fiasco. Nineteen ground-force soldiers and five
members of a helicopter crew perished on the first day, and dozens
of soldiers were wounded. (Among those killed was the 20-year-old
son of the writer David Grossman, who two days earlier had finally
come out publicly for ending the war.)
On Sunday morning, the Israeli cabinet
did, as expected, formally accept Resolution 1701. But for the whole
of that day, Israel’s air force, navy, and artillery continued to
pound Lebanon, including Beirut’s eastern suburbs. Ehud Barak told
CNN, “It’s time to do all we can to destroy as much as we can of the
infrastructure in the next 12 or 13 hours, and then we’ll see what
is next.” Within those last 72 hours of the war, the Israelis also
poured some 1.1 million cluster bomblets into south Lebanon. Large
numbers remained peppered throughout the country, killing Lebanese
children, farmers, and shepherds even after the ceasefire took hold.
Hizbullah, meanwhile, was undertaking a smaller-scale grand finale
of its own: that Sunday it fired its largest barrage of rockets,
more than 250, into northern Israel, reminding Israelis that the
government had failed in its goal of destroying Hizbullah’s
rocketing capability.
At the designated hour that Monday
morning, the battlefields suddenly fell quiet. A few small clashes
continued in the south between Hizbullah units and IDF troops. But
immediately, throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of
villagers displaced from the south started returning in convoys with
the encouragement and support of Hizbullah’s efficient
social-affairs apparatus. The journeys were complicated by the IDF’s
destruction of bridges and other choke points along vital routes,
and they were undertaken in clear defiance of an IDF broadcast that
villagers should, for the present, stay away from the south. The
return was reminiscent of Israel’s withdrawal from the border strip
six years earlier. As before, Hizbullah was ready not only with
victory banners and songs, but with food, water, and other supplies.
Hizbullah also presumably took this opportunity to send new supplies
and reinforcements to their fighters, who had evidently remained in
the southern region all along. That part of the return operation,
however, remained largely invisible. In keeping with Hizbullah’s
agreement with the Lebanese government, none of its fighters or
supporters traveling south carried weapons openly; and though many
southern men wore pieces of military clothing, no full military
uniforms were seen.
On August 17, in keeping with
Resolution 1701, the Lebanese army sent its first detachments to the
south. The IDF’s ground troops had started withdrawing from some of
their most exposed positions inside Lebanon as early as the morning
of August 15. By August 17, the army claimed it had withdrawn from
50 percent of the areas it had occupied. As it withdrew, it handed
those areas over to the overburdened UNIFIL troops.
Resolution 1701 envisioned increasing
UNIFIL from 2,000 to 15,000 troops, but it soon became evident that
would be a problem. France, which had previously indicated that it
would provide the bulk of the force, backed down after expressing
concerns about the rules of command and engagement being worked out
in New York. Meanwhile, the civilian residents of the south
continued to return and rebuild with a very thin cover of protection
from the Lebanese army and the UNIFIL. The Lebanese army did not
constitute a serious fighting force. It had taken numerous hits from
the IDF during the war but never joined the combat on either side.
It has never been particularly competent; and ever since early 1984,
when it split fatally along sectarian lines, it has remained a
politically fragile and operationally stunted formation whose main
function has been symbolic.
* * *
If the war was the result of
miscalculation on both sides, the costs—as always in war—were higher
for the attacker than for the well-prepared defender. If Hizbullah
was surprised by the scope and ferocity of the offensive Israel
unleashed, it was still able to fall back on excellent contingency
plans. Timur Goksel, who worked with UNIFIL for 24 years, including
a long stint as its political adviser, has said that Hizbullah had
“done incredible staff work, learning the lessons of guerrilla
warfare down the ages and carrying out a very deep and accurate
analysis of the Israeli army . . . The number one element is that
Hizbullah is not afraid of the Israelis. . . . After 18 years
fighting Israeli troops, they see them as vulnerable human beings
who make mistakes and are afraid like anyone else.”
Hizbullah’s frontline units in Lebanon
had mined most of the obvious routes Israel might have hoped to use
for a major ground incursion, forcing the IDF’s often top-heavy
armor to traverse precarious hillsides. The Hizbullah units were
small, agile, knew the topography well, and had studied the IDF’s
weapons systems and operating procedures meticulously. Mahnaimi
wrote, “Hezbollah appears to have divided a three mile-wide strip
along the Israeli-Lebanese border into numerous ‘killing boxes.’
Each box was protected in classic guerrilla fashion with
booby-traps, land mines, and even CCTV cameras to watch every step
of the advancing Israeli army.” Hizbullah was even able to crack the
codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio
communications, using the intelligence thus gained to adapt their
operations and establish the credibility of their public media by
often allowing them to scoop the IDF’s spokesmen in announcing
Israeli casualties. (Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV station never went off
the air, despite the IDF’s best efforts to bomb it.)
Hizbullah’s fighters generally kept
their distance from civilians, reducing the chances that their
positions would be found out by the IDF. And they placed Katyusha
platforms on retractable hydraulic launch pads in orchards so that
after firing they could be lowered and once again hidden in the
vegetation. Ze’ev Schiff has written, “The farmers received
instructions by cell phone regarding the number of rockets to launch
and in what direction and range. They were often provided with
thermal blankets to cover the position in order to keep [Israeli air
force] aircraft from detecting the post-shooting heat
signature.”
Many of the IDF infantry and tank units
that participated in the chaotic deployment of ground troops into
Lebanon on August 12—the day after the ceasefire was agreed
to—resented it. Because of the setbacks on the battlefield, many of
these units were brought back into Israel and demobilized within
days after the ceasefire took hold; and almost immediately they and
their families became a focus of strident opposition to Olmert and
Peretz. One group of 160 infantry reservists reportedly decided even
before they were demobilized that they wanted to join an August 17
demonstration, but their officers delayed their demobilization by a
day to prevent them from doing so. One week later, the parents of at
least three of the soldiers killed in Lebanon joined the Friday
protest.
All this indicated a season of
increasingly dire political challenges for Olmert. On August 25,
Yedioth Ahronoth published the results of a poll that
revealed that “63 percent of Israelis feel that Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert failed in managing the war in Lebanon and should resign.” In
Lebanon, meanwhile, pollsters reported on August 23 that 72 percent
of Lebanese—including clear majorities within all the country’s
major sectarian groups—judged that Hizbullah had won the recent
war.
* * *
The 33-day war had significant regional
and global repercussions that have continued to reverberate in the
weeks since August 14. Israel lost its bid to win power over the
government of Lebanon. Hizbullah’s political stock rose across the
whole Muslim Middle East as well as in Lebanon, where its new
political strength has allowed it to begin to subvert the spirit if
not the letter of point four of the seven-point plan.
The Bush administration had let down
Siniora, and the pro-Western bloc he represented, very badly indeed.
Siniora had risen to the premiership atop the wave of anti-Syrian,
pro-Western sentiment that fueled Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution in the
spring of 2005. But just 15 months later, Washington was working
hard to block a ceasefire and—beyond that—rushing emergency
shipments of advanced munitions to Israel while the IDF was
eviscerating Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and killing its
citizens, including large numbers of those who had supported the
Cedar Revolution. Washington’s standing in the Arab world fell even
lower than it had been.
There were other repercussions too.
Seymour Hersh has written that the Bush administration “was closely
involved” in the planning of the IDF’s campaign in Lebanon. He wrote
that (unnamed) current and former U.S. officials told him that
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney “were convinced
. . . that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against
Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground . . . complexes in Lebanon
could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to
a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear
installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.” The
Israeli action against Lebanon was seen as an opportunity to
field-test the same kind of weapons and tactics that the United
States might later use against Iran. Also, if Israel could
preemptively destroy Hizbullah’s military capability, then
Washington could attack Iran without being deterred by the risk that
Iran’s allies in Hizbullah might launch a counterattack against
Israel.
If the war was indeed such a field
test, the results have likely left the mullahs in Tehran sleeping
much more easily. Iranian and Syrian planners were given a good
opportunity to study the strengths and weaknesses of U.S.-Israeli
tactics and weapons systems. And the prospect of a Hizbullah
retaliation against northern Israel remains a significant deterrent
for a U.S. attack against Iran.
After August 14, the Lebanese swept
swiftly into action to rebuild the infrastructure pulverized by the
war. Hizbullah’s decision to organize the large-scale return of the
displaced communities to their homes in the south, starting that
very morning, proved to be a master stroke, since it flooded the
whole of the former combat zone with a population that strongly
supported it. (The American strategic analyst Pat Lang noted of this
mobilization, “A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been
possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops.”) As the
displaced people returned, Hizbullah’s experienced and respected
construction organization went into action cataloguing people’s
losses, organizing engineers and builders to do the clean-up and
rebuilding, and handing out stipends to those who had lost property.
The Lebanese government ran along behind, trying to compete, but it
had low credibility as an effective provider of services, and the
Western governments that had promised aid have taken a long time to
deliver.
A number of basic strategic and
political issues remain to be worked out. As of October 5, Israel
had withdrawn its troops from all the recently occupied terrain
except an area around the village of Ghajar. On September 22,
Nasrallah—who had prudently stayed hidden from Israel’s
assassination squads since July 12—made a landmark appearance at a
massive rally in south Beirut. The hour-long, widely broadcast
speech he gave captivated Arabic-speaking audiences throughout the
region. In it, he tied the question of Hizbullah laying down its
weapons to the organization’s longstanding demands for political
reform in Lebanon: “When we build a strong, capable, and just state
that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an
honorable solution to the question of the resistance and its
weapons. . . . It is not logical for these weapons to remain
forever.” He spelled out a reform platform based on the formation of
a national unity government (with, presumably, a much stronger
presence of Hizbullah and its allies) and the drafting of a fairer,
more representative election law. He vowed that the two IDF captives
would only be released as part of the long-demanded exchange of
prisoners. He told commanders of the newly strengthened UNIFIL that
Hizbullah welcomed their presence so long as they kept to the agreed
mission of supporting the Lebanese army; but he warned them not to
spy on Hizbullah or to try to disarm it, or to try to interfere in
Lebanon’s internal affairs at all.
The once burning issue of whether and
how Hizbullah’s militia might be dismantled has been shelved for
now. The governments contributing troops to the expanded UNIFIL
requested and received assurances from the UN that their troops
would not be required to disarm Hizbullah by force; and the Lebanese
army is certainly not about to do it. There have been some signs of
a quiet power struggle within some of Lebanon’s security-related
posts. It is likely that the pro-Western figures in these posts,
cultivated by the United States and France for the past two years,
will be quietly shunted aside.
Inside Israel, the humiliating results
of Olmert’s war have almost paralyzed the political system. One of
the first political casualties of the war was the “convergence”
plan, under which Israel would undertake a limited but unilateral
withdrawal from the West Bank. That plan had formed the central
plank of Olmert’s election campaign and subsequent government;
indeed, it was the very raison d’être of the recently formed
Kadima party. But when the Israeli public saw that no wall or fence
was high enough to keep out rockets launched by still-angry
neighbors, Olmert unceremoniously shelved the convergence plan.
Leaders of the pro-settler movement rejoiced. But Israel as a whole
was left rudderless, with no plan at all for dealing with the
Palestinian issue.
At a broader level, Israel now finds
itself at a strategic crossroads. Since the August ceasefire,
Israeli strategic analysts have been trying to address the
weaknesses in their forces revealed by the Lebanon campaign. Many of
them have concluded that Halutz’s decision to rely almost wholly on
air power was deeply flawed. Reuven Pedatzur wrote, “The ground
forces must be reorganized with an emphasis on increasing their
size, quality and special operations units . . . It may be time to
consider creating a Special Operations Forces Command or corps. And
it is time to return to a training plan that would keep the
reservists at full operational capability.” Padetzur made the
interesting and plausible claim that the force reconfiguration need
not be any more expensive for Israel. But when he referred to “a
training plan that would keep the reservists at full operational
capability,” he identified a more serious constraint on the force
configuration that he recommended, since Israelis may now be less
willing than in the past to donate considerable portions of their
lives to military service. Some Israeli analysts long ago suggested
turning the IDF into a smaller, well-paid, all-volunteer force, just
like the U.S. military. That idea became quite popular in a society
whose standard of living exceeds that of some Western European
nations and where much of the population no longer holds the
communalist ideals of early Zionism. Even the former tradition of
requiring a month’s reserve service from men between their three
years of full-time conscription and their mid-50s had been largely
abandoned—until suddenly, this summer, when large numbers of
ground-force reserves were called up, and they and their officers
suddenly discovered how rusty the IDF’s infantry skills had grown.
The Israelis therefore face a broad
choice: will they be content to transform their society back into a
kind of Sparta in which the youth-conscription and reserve-service
obligations grow, in the service of a seemingly unending war with
neighbors to the north and south, and in the heart of the West Bank?
Or are they prepared to negotiate with the Palestinians, the
Syrians, and the Lebanese the kind of momentous peace agreement
that, though it would involve total or near-total withdrawals from
Golan and the West Bank, would at least leave the evacuated lands in
the hands of a robust nation-state interlocutor who could (as Jordan
and Egypt already are) be held accountable for any further
cross-border infractions?
It would be great to imagine that wise
leadership from the United States or elsewhere in the international
community might guide Israelis as they make this serious,
identity-defining choice. But I’m not holding my breath for that.
Nor, for the moment, does it seem that visionary antiwar Israelis
like Uri Avnery, Yossi Beilin, and Naomi Chazan are about to grab
the imaginations of their compatriots. (Chazan has noted sadly that
“this war has split the peace ranks even more than the second
intifada.”)
But the postwar period is a time of
great political turmoil, and not only in Israel. Hizbullah’s
performance in the war showed all the peoples of the Muslim Middle
East that the model of acquiescing with and accommodating Israeli
power that their governments and many of their elites had followed
for so long is no longer the only way, and perhaps not the best way,
to achieve their core interests. The credibility of the United
States as a neutral arbiter or even as a sincerely pro-democracy
force in the region has suffered because of the decisions the Bush
administration made, with considerable support from both parties in
Congress, during the war in Lebanon. All this while the erosion of
U.S. power continues on a daily basis in Iraq. And the strategic
position of Iran—in Iraq and in the Gulf, as well as in Lebanon—has
been steadily improving.
Some in the antiwar movement have been
warning that the Bush administration is preparing a large,
pre-election military strike against Iran. For various reasons—but
mainly because I don’t believe that even President Bush and his
advisers could be quite that reckless—I do not wholly share this
anxiety. But it is clear that the United States and Iran are
entering a massive struggle for power in the Middle East. The
results of the war in Lebanon will certainly affect that broader
struggle ahead. <
Helena
Cobban is a global-affairs columnist for The Christian
Science Monitor and Al-Hayat, and a contributing
editor of Boston Review.
Originally published in the November/December
2006 issue of Boston Review. |