Category: Lebanon

The ironies of the Middle East are rich indeed. On Wednesday, Hizbullah head Sayed Hassan Nasrallah praised the work of Israel’s Winograd Commission, which on Tuesday issued an Interim Report that blasted PM Olmert, defense minister Peretz, and former chief of staff Halutz for taking Israel to defeat in last summer’s war in Lebanon.
Nasrallah praised the Commission’s report on two main grounds:

1. For saying forthrightly that Israel’s war effort had indeed resulted in a defeat– an outcome that various Israeli leaders and their apologists elsewhere in the world have been desperately trying to hide and/or fudge or reframe ever since both sides’ guns fell silent last August 14th; and
2. For acting in a responsible and publicly accountable way to hold Israel’s existing elected leadership to some form of effective public account.

Are you surprised about this apparent endorsement Nasrallah gave to the state of democracy inside Israel?
Don’t be. This is an ongoing twist in the long-running and big-stakes conflict of wills he’s been fighting against Lebanon’s own PM, Fouad Siniora.
Here’s what Nasrallah said in that general regard:

“It is worthy of respect that an investigative commission appointed by (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert condemns him,” Nasrallah told a crowd at the opening of a book fair in a south Beirut neighborhood complex that was rebuilt after being leveled by Israeli warplanes during the summer fighting.
“Even though they’re our enemies, it is worthy of respect that the political forces and the Israeli public act quickly to save their state, entity, army and their existence from the crisis,” the Shiite Muslim cleric added.

And here’s Siniora’s reaction to the commission report:

Saniora… did not offer any praise for Israel and instead called on the deeply divided Lebanon to unite. He warned that Israel could be planning future attacks to restore its credibility.
“I call on my Lebanese brothers to unite in the face of what Israel might be seeking to launch against Lebanon,” Saniora said.
Saniora’s government has been facing a campaign by the Hezbollah-led opposition to force it to resign. Hezbollah officials accused the majority of conniving with the Israelis to destroy the pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian guerrillas.

Siniora is one of many Bush-supported, high-level pols around the world (think Olmert, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales… ) who are today desperately trying to hang onto their positions in the face of rising protests centered primarily on the roles they played in various Cheney-orchestrated war ventures around the world.
Regarding Olmert, yesterday he managed to beat off the challenge that his foreign minister Tzipi Livni had mounted to his leadership of the Kadima Party and also the government.
Evidently Livni had failed to do adequate homework inside Kadima’s leadership circles before she announced her challenge to Olmert in public. She failed to receive enough backing for her challenge to work, so she emerged from yesterday’s events looking a little foolish and whiny.
Meanwhile, all these political goings-on inside Kadima’s leadership circles allow Israel’s government to continue to avoid engaging in any serious way with any aspects of the Middle East’s urgently needed peace diplomacy. Or rather, they “allow” this to happen because, basically, the ever-permissive (to Israel) Bush-Cheney government allows them to allow it to happen.
Today, the big street protests against Olmert are coming together in Tel Aviv. Not sure yet what effect they will have, though my expectation is still that because of the widely mixed and still fluid nature of the demonstrators’ politics their effect will be unclear and most likely indecisive.

I’m on the road. I arrived in Damascus from Amman by car about an hour ago. Now I’m settled in the Omayad Hotel which has wifi in the rooms. Great!
But I learned from commenter David that the veteran Lebanese journoJoseph Samaha has died. I agree it’s a huge loss to Middle Eastern intellectual life. David points out that As’ad Abu Khalil has a good post about Joseph on Angry Arab.
I have very little to add to that. As’ad knew Joseph much, much better than I did. I do remember a good evening we had in Beirut back in November 2004 with some friends who had invited a small number of other guests, of whom Joseph was one. It was an excellent conversation. (I knew his friend Fawaz Trabulsi a bit better than him, back in the 70s.)
Anyway, As’ad’s post is really informative. One of his longest ever; and it reveals a lot about what a great loss Joseph’s passing is. (It also tells us some nice things about As’ad. Maybe an increased sense of human connectedness is one of the legacies of the passing of a good person.)

Back during the Israel-Hezbullah war, some websites– and even the Australian Foreign Minister– propagated accusations that reports published by Human Rights Watch and a number of media outlets that on July 23 Israel attacked two clearly marked Lebanese Red Cross ambulances near Qana were quite false; and indeed, that these reports were part of a Hizbullah-orchestrated “hoax” designed to smear Israel.
After the war ended, HRW was able to go back and re-examine all the evidence related to the incident very carefully. On December 19, it published the results of this investigation, and concluded that,

the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead. The physical and testimonial evidence collected by Human Rights Watch disproves the allegations of a “hoax,” made by persons who never visited Lebanon and had no opportunity to assess the evidence first-hand. Those claiming a hoax relied on faulty conjectures based on a limited number of photographs of one of the ambulances.

In the attack, the three already-wounded passengers who were being transferred from one ambulance to another at the time were further wounded, and all six of the ambulance workers involved were also wounded.
This page of the HRW report says,

The limited damage and the high precision of the strikes on the ambulances suggest that the weapon was a smaller type of missile fired from an Israeli drone or helicopter. Israel is in possession of an arsenal of highly precise missiles that can be fired from either helicopters or drones and are designed to limit the damage to their targets. The Israeli-designed and manufactured SPIKE anti-armor missile system and the still experimental DIME (dense inert metal explosive) missile are examples of smaller missiles designed to cause smaller explosions and limit collateral damage. Such missiles cause less powerful explosions than the previous generation of US-manufactured TOW and Hellfire missiles (often used by the IDF in assassination attempts against Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank), which would have destroyed the ambulances completely. While the smaller missiles can be fired from either drones or helicopters, none of the witnesses reported hearing helicopters in the air before or during the attack, so it is most likely the missiles were fired from an Israeli drone.

On this page of the report, the researchers give a detailed refutation of the claims made by those who argued that the whole incident had been a Hizbullah-orchestrated “hoax”. (Those who argued this included Oliver North– yes, he of the Iran-Contra scandal, now having reinvented himself as a rightwing radio personality.)
HRW concludes the report by stating,

Human Rights Watch trusts that, now that the truth has been demonstrated, these armchair deniers will devote their energy to pressing Israel to determine why this attack occurred, who was responsible, whether disciplinary or punitive measures are in order, and what steps can be taken to ensure that similar attacks are not repeated in the future. It would also be appropriate to press for compensation to the victims as well.

It would also be appropriate for everyone concerned to note the it is one of the foundations of the whole body of international humanitarian law that clearly marked ambulances are absolutely not to be subjected to any attack. To attack such a vehicle is a grave breach of the laws of war, that is, a war crime.

Numerous male commentators, looking at the Hizbullah protests in Lebanon– and claiming they sought only to indicate either the seemingly “western” looks of some participants in the protests, or the diversity of their clothing styles– have published fairly lascivious-looking photographs of young women among the protesters. And by an amazing coincidence (not!), many of these photos have emphasized down-the-cleavage shots and other pieces of bare torso skin.
Often, too, these images have been accompanied by demeaning, feminophobic references to adult women as being “babes”. (Q.v., Josh Landis, among others.)
I have made the point that one can discuss the general issue of the diversity of clothing styles among the protesters– with some women wearing full black hijab and others wearing tight jeans and tops that, yes, do show a lot of cleavage– without propagating demeaningly sexist images that perpetuate the idea that women are to be judged primarily according to men’s perceptions of their physical attributes rather than by the contribution their actions make to the common good…
Anyway, if one does want to publish an image that represents the social diversity of the protesters, here is my favorite, published by AP today:

The caption reads: “A Lebanese child holds a picture showing Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah during the tenth day of an open-ended protest, in central Beirut, Lebanon Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006. Hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah-led protesters swarmed downtown Beirut on Sunday, demanding Prime Minister Fuad Saniora cede some power to the opposition or step down. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)”
The larger story here, of course, that I do intend to write about as soon as I have the time to give it its due, is the amazing success Hizbullah and its allies have had in organizing and keeping the discipline within this series of massive nonviolent protests… As well as the broader commitment that all parties in Lebanon have shown thus far to the principle of not allowing themselves to be dragged back into use of violence as they strive to resolve intra-Lebanese differences that truly are very complex.
There was the sad exception of the incident last Sunday that killed one anti-Saniora protester. But thankfully that did not spark any continuing cycle of violence.

Yes, I know that young Pierre Genayyal was assassinated today in Beirut, and I send my condolences to his family.
Huge kudos to his father, the former President Amin Gemayyel, for stressing the need for calm. It would be nice if world leaders could follow that good advice, too.
Twenty-four years ago, in September 1982, it was the killing of young Pierre’s uncle Bashir that sparked a horrible, Israeli-facilitated orgy of revenge killing by his crazed followers that left many hundreds of unarmed Palestinians dead in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Amin– and everyone else– has every reason to fear that strong adherents of the family’s Phalangist Paty might stage a repeat of those massacres. (Though of course, this time round, we can hope that there will be no facilitating party in there providing trucks to convey the Phalangist killers from their home areas to the refugee camps, and flares to light their way once they get there… )
But still, Amin’s call for calm is particularly valuable at this time. How truly terrible for him to lose his son in this way.

Pat Lang, who has forgotten more about the strategic realities of today’s Middle East than most of us ever knew, has been consistently clearheaded in his analysis of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
He recently wrote this:

Apologists for Israel’s failure in this campaign will try to spin the surprise suffered by Hizbullah [at the ferocity of Israel’s response on July 12– which Nasrallah has of course, already admitted to. ~HC] to mean [Hizbullah’s] defeat.
It is nothing like that. In fact, the surprise of the ferocity and persistence of the Israeli riposte makes even more significant the Hizbullah recovery under extreme pressure and the quality of the defense they mounted.
Claims for Israeli “victory” in the Lebanon campaign continue to puzzle me:
– Strategic Victory? Israel did not force the Lebanese government to carry out the “tasks” that it had in mind for it. It is not disarming Hizbullah. It is not preventing re-supply of Hizbullah.
– Diplomatic Victory? The multinational force is there, but doing little that the Israelis would want. This time the French have brought tanks with them. Do you think it is the Lebanese Army or Hizbullah that inspired that deployment? No. The French have long experience of what the IDF has done with tanks vis a vis UN Forces.
– Operational Level Victory? (campaign level) The Hizbullahis still have a lot of rockets and are still in southern Lebanon where they could start shooting into the Galilee. The Hizbullahis fired more rockets into Israel on the last day of the war than on any previous day. Conclusion: The Israelis did not succeed in stopping rocket fire into Israel.
– Tactical Victory? Where?
Israeli and associated political warfare is trying to spin this set of defeats into victory. Good luck to them.

I have made many of these same points on JWN (e.g. here) and I develop them further in my upcoming article in Boston Review. Col. Pat just makes them more succinctly…
I do wonder, though, why the Israelis and so many of their friends are so intent on spinning the results of the 33-day war in this way, when if they have any intel capabilities left at all they must know that strategic planners from many Middle Eastern countries are now attentively studying the secrets of Hizbullah’s victory in order to learn from them. What do they gain from this attempt to deny reality? I suppose the answer is that they must be desperate to try to darn together the now-tattered cloth of the credibility of their “military deterrent”. And maybe we should be happy to let them do that for a while, since the credibility of a deterrent capability that was so rudely shattered by the bombs of July and August, has now been re-established– by both sides… And as a result, South Lebanon and northern Israel are for the present quiet.
Which gives all interested parties a good opportunity to restart the only kind of peace negotiations that can assure a stable longterm peace in that region– that is, all-party negotiations aimed at the speedy conclusion of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.
So why on earth aren’t the Israelis leaping at that opportunity?

Here’s the short version of the 33-day war that wracked Lebanon and some of northern Israel this summer.
On the morning of July 12, Hizbullah undertook two cross-border actions against Israel. One of them (the diversion) was to rocket a couple of border areas (no casualties recorded.) The other– the “real thing”– was to ambush a two-jeep patrol. In the ambush they killed three IDF soldiers, wounded two, and captured two others, taking them to captivity somewhere in Lebanon.
The diversion had been so successful– and the IDF’s operating procedures so sloppy– that it was half an hour before any one in the IDF Northern Command even realised the jeep patrol had been attacked. At that point, the IDF sent a tank unit in “hot” (or by that time, decidedly “cool”) pursuit after the Hizbullahis into Lebanon. The tank unit went straight into a land-mine trap. One tank was completely blown up. It took the IDF nearly a further day (and one further life) to get the tank and the bodies of its four dead crew members out of there.
PM Olmert had never faced a national-security challenge like this before and may well have felt flustered and humiliated. He and his equally inexperienced defense minister Amir Peretz clearly felt they had a lot to prove… and they had chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former chief of the Air Force, whispering in their ears that he “had the solution” to all the government’s problems… By the end of that day, July 12, the Olmert government had decided to launch what was clearly signaled as a full-scale reprisal attack against all of Lebanon.
That CNN report there, from July 12, spells out that Olmert had stated that,

The 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.”

The head of the IDF’s northern command, Udi Adam, said,

“This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon… Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate — not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts.”

And Halutz said,

“If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”

So, the attack was quite evidently (and declaredly) not just against Hizbullah, though later the Israeli leaders tried to claim it had been. And that very night, the Israeli air force, navy, and long-range artillery units started attacking infrastructure targets throughout the whole of Lebanon.
* * *
What were they thinking?
As best as I can reconstruct it, Olmert’s very inexperienced leadership team was fighting at that point for one major goal: They sought to bomb Lebanon’s government and people into compliance with their request that the Lebanese authorities agree to disarm and hopefully also dismantle Hizbullah. And they would do this through “strategic counter-value bombing”, a strategy whose time, Halutz evidently felt, had finally come! Never mind that this time round, Israel didn’t even have any allies inside Lebanon in the way it had back in June 1982, when Ariel Sharon had launched his earlier war against the country. This time, Halutz evidently felt Israel didn’t even need any allies: they had total air superiority, plentiful supplies of extremely enormous and lethal American and Israeli munitions; and they could simply bomb the Lebanese people into submission.
(And never mind, either, 80 years’ worth of experience indicating that airpower on its own is only very, very rarely able to effect political change on the ground.)
Well, it didn’t work. Not only did the Saniora government not bow to Olmert’s demands– but Hizbullah’s rockets started coming into northern Israel in far greater numbers than they had done during that first, limited diversionary bombardment– and on a regular and seemingly unstoppable basis.
For Hizbullah, whose claims that they hadn’t expected the full-scale Israeli Blitzkrieg may or may not be true, the war had rapidly become one about something very important to them: their ability to “deter” a full-scale Israeli attack on Lebanon, which had been very badly eroded by Olmert’s decision to launch Halutz’s long-planned Blitzkrieg. Hizbullah’s people evidnetly felt they needed to restore the credibility of their deterrent.
But guess what? Once Hizbullah’s rockets started raining regularly on and around communities in northern Israel, the Olmert/Halutz leadership felt it needed majorly to restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent, too. (That feeling had anyway been percolating throughout rightwing circles in Israel ever since PM Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and had become stronger after Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year…)
And so the fighting ground on, between these two parties each fighting determinedly to restore the credibility of its own “deterrent.” Also, Hizbullah was understandably anxious not to let the Saniora government fall into the grip of Israel’s political schemes.
So Hizbullah’s very expert political operatives– who included two members of Saniora’s government, a dozen MPs, and numerous other pols very experienced in the intricacies of Lebanon’s internal situation– went into action. In the Lebanese political field, the Israelis had almost no assets at all with which to counter them. I mean, what could they say: “Dear Fouad Saniora, we’re so sorry we’re bombing your country and killing your people but please enter into an alliance with us anyway?”
So Halutz kept promising the Israeli government that “within ten days”, or “within two weeks”, or whatever, his bombardment would bear fruit. And they had the Bush administration (and lapdog Blair) totally on their side, running serious interference for them by blocking any possibility of a ceasefire for almost a full month there, at the UN and elsewhere.
The IDF was given all the time (and emergency resupply of munitions from the US) that it needed. But Halutz’s Blitzkrieig still didn’t have the desired political effect. Finally, during the first week of August, the Israeli leaders started getting serious about supplementing the air attack with a ground invasion. But Gen. Adam apparently understood full well that his ground forces were in lousy shape. He stalled (I think) and there was evidently a massive set of debates in the Kirya (Israel’s mini-Pentagon) in those days. Israelis anyway– and quite understandably– have a lot of wariness about sending ground forces for any length of time into Lebanon. When the ground incursion came it was late– it started, indeed, even after the text of the ceasefire resolution had been agreed at the UN in New York on the evening of August 11. It was also just as disastrous as Gen. Adam had feared it would be.
On August 14, ceasefire day, Israeli ground troops started pouring back home from Lebanon, carrying with them the many casualties they had suffered during those last two days, and a massive sense of shame, frustration, bewilderment, and anger that continues to rock Israel to this day.
On that same day, starting at 8 in the morning, the hundreds of thousands of civilian supporters of Hizbullah who had been violently displaced from their homes in south Lebanon by the fighting started flocking back to their homes in any way they could get there. Here’s what the very experienced military analyst Pat Lang wrote on his blog that day:

A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.

Well, yes and no… I did note with interest, however, the stress that Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah put in his most recent (Sept. 22) speech, on the evidently well-planned actions his adherents undertook on August 14. He told that adoring crowd of his supporters,

When 14 August came, [the Israelis’] wager was that the presence of the displaced in the areas to which they were displaced would put pressure on the resistance to impose more conditions on it. The resistance did not submit to any conditions.
Once again, you amazed the world when the displaced returned in their cars and trucks, and some on foot. At 0800, the southern suburb of Beirut, the south of Lebanon, and Al-Biqa were full of their proud and honourable residents, who returned with raised heads.

* * *
It seems clear to me that at this point, in the “battle” for the loyalty of the Lebanese government and people, Hizbullah has come out streets ahead of the Olmert government. Olmert in 2006, like Shimon Peres in 1996, sought to use extreme military pressure on the people and the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon to try to turn the country against Hizbullah. In 2006 as in 1996, this project not only failed, but it back-fired significantly, leaving Hizbullah politcally stronger inside Lebanon than it had been before the Israeli assault.
In the other “battle” that both sides were fighting, meanwhile– the one in which each was seeking to re-establish the “credibility” of its ability to militarily deter the other, both sides won. There is an element of good news in this. The Lebanon-Israel border is now marked by a return of the basic strategic stability– underpinned by effective reciprocal deterrence– that marked it from 2000 through July 12 of this year. That is the reason why the August 11 ceasefire has “stuck” so amazingly, and has been so remarkably successful since August 14– and also why it can be expected to continue to stick well for some further time to come. This stability has almost nothing at all to do with the presence of (now) about 5,000 more UNIFIL troops in southern Lebanon than were there before the war.
So a world that is crying out for proficient peacekeepers in so many trouble-spots might indeed ask today: What on earth are all those well-trained European and other UN units actually doing in South Lebanon at this time?
Good question.
Philippe Bolopion of Le Monde described a leaked version of the force’s new Rules of Engagement and “Operational Concept” as follows:

Continue reading “Lebanese war; post-war; role of UNIFIL”

Preface note: For the past several decades, the British and US governments, via the BBC and the former US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) – now re-organized as the “open source center” (OSC) – have quietly collaborated in producing very valuable translations of speeches, articles, and key documents from the Middle East. Identical translations of materials, such as the following full text of Nasrallah’s speech on Friday, are usually released simultaneously. BBC versions often have helpful summaries and sub-headings inserted editorially (as below). I have reason though to suspect the US OSC side of the arrangement is being increasingly politicized, an old chronic problem, but perhaps worse lately. (The following Nasrallah translation is still not in the WNC data base — what the public can view via “depository” and subscribing libraries) As such, here’s the BBC version. In the comments, I’ll append additional reactions to the speech from Lebanon, Israel, etc.
On substance, Nasrallah’s isn’t here giving any “red meat” to neocons about presumed “mistakes.” (e.g., “if he had known how Israel would respond, he would not have so and so….”) Instead, Nasrallah’s emphasis here is on characterizing Hizbullah’s “victory” as a triumph for all of Lebanon – one that defended Lebanon against threats from abroad and within. (comments aimed at “divide and conquer” analysis.) Note the reference to Hizbullah’s resistance as a “model” for Iraq. Consider also what is not said – esp. re. Iran. Nasrallah is no “dummy.” — Scott

—————————–
I seek God’s protection against the cursed Satan; in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate; praise be to almighty God; blessings and peace be upon our master and prophet, the last of the prophets, Muhammad; his good, righteous, infallible family members; his noble companions; and upon all the prophets and messengers;
O beloved and honourable ones; O most honourable, pure, and generous people, may God’s peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you; [applause].
Praise be to God, who fulfilled His promise to us and who granted us, Lebanon, and the people of Lebanon victory over the enemy of Lebanon. Praise be to God who made us proud, enabled us to hold fast, and gave us security. Praise be to God, on whom we relied and to whom we turned repentantly. As He promised, He has always been the best protector. Praise be to God for His victory, assistance, and support.
Brothers and sisters, Ladies and Gentlemen.
On 22 September, you once again surprised the world and truly proved that you are a great, proud, loyal, and courageous people. [Applause]
Rally involves risks
For some days now, many people have been waging a psychological war on this rally, just as they waged a psychological war on the Resistance. [Boos] They said that this square would be bombed and that this podium would be destroyed in order to scare people and keep them from coming. On 22 September, you prove, by crowning the victory rally, that you are more courageous than [you were on] 12 July and 14 August. [Applause]
Standing before you and amongst you involves risk for you and me. There were other choices, up until just half an hour ago, we were discussing [my participation]. However, my heart, mind, and soul did not allow me to address you from afar nor through a screen. [Applause]
The utmost one expects is for the enemy to make a mistake or commit a crime. However, does this enemy not know who we are? We are the sons of that imam, who said: Are you threatening me with death? We are used to death and our dignity is derived from the martyrdom God grants us. [Applause]
You are all welcome – from the fighting and resisting south, to the steadfast Al-Biqa, to the loyal north, to the proud mountain, to the Beirut of Arabism, to the [southern] suburb of loftiness and dignity. You are all welcome – from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; you are all welcome – from Syria, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, and every country that came to us to celebrate and rejoice.
God’s peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you; peace be upon your martyrs and the families of your martyrs; peace be upon your wounded people and their bleeding wounds; peace be upon your prisoners; peace be upon your blood and tears; peace be upon your orphans and widows; peace be upon your demolished houses; peace be upon your burnt property; peace be upon your souls and strong will, which is stronger than the mountains of Lebanon.
“Strategic, historic, divine victory”
Brothers and sisters,
We are today celebrating a big strategic, historic, and divine victory.

Continue reading “Nasrallah full text “we won””