Category: Lebanon

Nasrallah has now– as forecast– made a public appearance at the big Hizbullah rally in Beirut today. This, in open defiance of the many threats that Israeli political and military leaders have made against his life, even after the conclusion of the August 11/August 14 ceasefire.
During late August and early September, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert taunted Nasrallah a number of times, asking when he would come out of the “bunker” in which, Olmert alleged, Nasrallah was hiding. On a number of occasions, Nasrallah calmly told interviewers from the media that he would appear at a seemly and appropriate time, once all the bodies of Lebanese residents killed by Olmert’s military had been recovered and buried.
By the way, human rights researchers in Lebanon say that in recent weeks they have been able to travel extensively around south Lebanon. Families of Hizbullah fighters are nearly always eager to note that affiliation on the tombstones and the memorial notices that are widely posted throughout the whole region. Based on this evidence, the researchers estimate that the ratio of Hizbullah fighters to civilians killed in Lebanon is somewhere around 1:7 or 1:8 .
With a total Lebanese casualty toll of about 1,200, that would give a total of about 150 to 170 Hizbullah fighters killed. Among Israelis, the casualty toll was 118 IDF members killed and 39 civilians. RIP, all of them.

Here, in no particular order, are some additional resources that I wanted to bookmark:
(1) Two informative, shortish papers on Hizbullah’s war-time decisionmaking and post-war prospects, by Dr. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Lebanese American University, both PDF files: 1 and 2 .
These are published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, which summarizes their findings thus:

• Hizbollah’s July 12 attack on an Israeli convoy was intended to provoke a prisoner exchange; it was not an Iranian-directed effort to trigger a wider conflict.
• Although prepared for it, Hizbollah did not expect a massive Israeli counter-strike.
• Hizbollah perceives Washington as the engineer of Israel’s current offensive and now views itself as in direct confrontation with the overall U.S. agenda for the region.
• Hizbollah aims to compromise the perception of Israeli military supremacy in the region, with the hope of undermining the stability of Israel itself.

The papers contain a wealth of strong interview material with various Hizbullah leaders (including some I interviewed back in November 2004), but none with Hassan Nasrallah.
(2) The August 2006 (online) edition of Strategic Assessment, which published by the Jaffee Center for Strageic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This entire edition is devoted to the Israel-Hizbullah war, and just about all of the papers in it that I’ve read have been interesting– sometimes substantively, and sometimes because they reveal a certain mindset among the contributors.
It’s evident that the authors were laboring under the disadvantage that they were writing before the war had ended– but most likely, while it was already clear that it was not going well for Israel.
I found these nuggets particularly revealing:
(a) From Ephraim Kam’s paper, The Ayatollah, Hizbollah, and Hassan Nasrallah:

There is no doubt about Iran’s deep involvement in Hizbollah activity… Nonetheless, there is no need to regard the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers, which led to the current deterioration in Lebanon, as an outgrowth of an Iranian initiative to ease international pressure regarding its nuclear weapons program. Despite its affinity with Iran, Hizbollah is not an Iranian puppet, and the two have not always seen eye to eye over political and operational issues. Hizbollah has its own considerations, which are not only related to its status as an important factor in the Lebanese arena, but also subject to Syrian influence. Therefore, one may assume that the move was, first and foremost, the result of a decision taken by the Hizbollah leadership.
Hassan Nasrallah had good reasons of his own to kidnap the soldiers. He had announced his intention months in advance, and had tried to do so in the past. From his perspective the timing was right for a move of this sort, with the IDF engaged in a major operation in the Gaza Strip and the north at the height of its tourist season. On the other hand, it is difficult to see what great gain Iran would derive from the operation: since the apparent expectation was that Israel’s reaction would be limited, as in the past, the benefit in postponing the preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear issue could also be expected to be limited. Therefore, one may assume that in the current situation, Hizbollah coordinated the kidnapping with Iran at least in a general manner and that Iran gave the organization its blessing, but did not dictate its moves.

(b) And this, from JCSS head Zvi Shtauber, in his wrap-up piece The Crisis in Lebanon: An Interim Assessment:

The main problem in Lebanon is the absence of a sovereign authority willing and capable of enforcing its rule. This is a highly problematic obstacle because of Lebanon’s sectarian composition and the Shiite majority, and no multinational force can be a proper substitute for such a sovereign authority. Ironically, the departure of the Syrians, who long served as traditional Israeli leverage to restrain Hizbollah, only made matters worse.

Ironic, indeed.
Anyway, enjoy all those as much as you want…

It’s here. It’s long. It’s from the US taxpayer-funded ‘Open Source Center’.
I have just skimmed it but haven’t had time yet to give it anything like a close read.
Though the OSC doesn’t tell you this, the interviewer was Talal Salman, who is I believe the Managing Editor of As-Safir.
We can discuss it here. If you want to either suggest corrections for a portion of the translation or to comment on a portion of the text, please give the first few words of the para you’re refrring to so we can find it easily. Thanks!

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave an interview to As-Safir’s Talal Salman which is in the paper today. Here are the highlights from it. And here, in three parts, is the text: 1, 2, 3.

(Btw, I think those URLs work only on the day of publication. On future days, to get to the same place, where the URL currently has ‘/today/’ you should replace that with ‘/oldissues/20060905/’. I think that’s how it works… though I don’t know why they can’t put them up with permalinks from the get-go. Grrr.)

Anyway, it looks interesting. Here’s a quickie Al-jazeera rendering of the main points in English.
It includes this:

In an August 27 televised interview, Nasrallah had said he would not have ordered the capture of the two Israeli soldiers if he had known it would lead to such a war.
But in the As-Safir interview, Nasrallah said his group fought a war that brought “strategic and historic victory” for Lebanon.
Nasrallah contended that Israel was unable to achieve any of its declared goals, including destroying Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and infrastructure, pushing its fighters away from south Lebanon and freeing the two captured soldiers.
He mocked Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, saying: “His only achievement was putting me in a shelter.”
Nasrallah went into hiding on the first day of the war and has not been seen in public since.

Here is a short UPI story about the interview, in English.
It includes this:

In an interview with Beirut’s daily As-Safir Tuesday, Nasrallah said his party will keep its Iranian-supplied rockets in south Lebanon but will not use them against Israel unless in the case of a large-scale invasion or aggression against Lebanon.
“We will retain these rockets as we did from 1996 until 2006 without using them. These rockets will not be resorted to unless Israel launched an all-out military offensive on Lebanon,” Nasrallah said…
Nasrallah said he did not regret kidnapping the Israeli soldiers stressing that “the resistance movement did not commit a mistake, but its move was accurate and well calculated.”
Nasrallah contradicted what he told a local television channel only a few days ago that he would not have taken such a move had he known that the Israeli retaliation would be that harsh.
The black-turbaned cleric said he presumed Israel’s reaction to the kidnapping would be similar and as harsh as its offensive on Gaza after the abduction of Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit by Hamas.
Nasrallah pointed out that the “resistance movement is present in an undeclared way south of the Litani River” and that “its role is to back up and support the Lebanese army.”

This strikes me as quite significant. He is saying in public what everyone knows, which is that Hizbullah will be keeping its rocket force (in south Lebanon only? or not specified by him thus in the text? anyone?) But hitherto, I think he and everyone else has been a little coy about stating this in public.
Does this signify a new self-confidence? A desire to tweak his opponents in Israel and elsewhere?
… Anyway, if anyone can point us to, or provide, translations of greater portions of the interview than this, or clarifications or informed answers to some of the above questions, that would be great. It looks like another important source.
Thanks!

Mouin Rabbani, an extremely thoughtful and knowledgeable person who’s a Contributing Editor to Middle East Report, has responded to this recent JWN post about Hassan Nasrallah’s lengthy t.v. interview on Sunday evening in the following terms:

I think some clarification is in order regarding Nasrallah’s statement [Sunday] in his interview with New TV about the recent war in Lebanon.
What he stated was that neither he nor any other member of the 15-member Hizballah leadership believed there was even a “one in a hundred possibility” that Israel would respond to the capture of two Israeli soldiers with such a ferocious war, that this assessment was based on decades of observing Israeli conduct, and that if they had instead believed that the 12 July operation would produce the war that it did, they would definitely not have authorised the attack.
But given additional statements he made immediately before and after the above, which have received virtually no coverage and not all of which are consistent with the above statement, I think it would be wrong to interpret this as a mea culpa or apology.
Before he made the above statement, and as part of his response to the same question, Nasrallah stated that shortly after the war began (2-3 days) Hizballah confirmed that the US and Israel had been preparing for an Israeli war against Hizbollah/Lebanon to be launched in September or October. This war would (according to Nasrallah) be launched on the basis of a pretext, or one provided by the Israelis (he mentioned the possibility of Israeli special forces landing in southern Lebanon and lobbing a few shells over the border), or if necessary without a pretext. It would also be an overwhelming assault, that aimed to eliminate the entire Hizballah leadership, its senior cadres (by bombing their homes), key Party installations etc., in a first wave of attacks so devastating that the organisation would be dismembered from the outset leaving only dazed and disorganised pockets of fighters to be easily mopped up thereafter. Nasrallah repeatedly made the point that key to Israeli planning and the success of its war would be the element of surprise.
But because the war was launched in response to a Hizballah action, Nasrallah continued, the vital element of surprise was lost. All the more so, according to Nasrallah, because the movement did not intend to inflict significant Israeli casualties on 12 July, rather only to capture Israeli soldiers. But the unanticipated clash/destruction of an Israeli tank by a landmine and resulting death of 8 Israeli soldiers on 12 July meant that Hizballah immediately went into a state of maximum alert. In other words, Israel failed to achieve on 13 July much of what according to Nasrallah it may well have achieved in September/October, and Nasrallah explicitly concluded that the results for Lebanon would have been devastating if US-Israeli planning had been permitted to proceed unimpeded by 12 July.
So in my view his statement was anything but a mea culpa. One can choose to accept his explanation at face value or not. But the overall (in significant part unstated) message Nasrallah sought to convey, I think, was the following:
— An Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 was a certainty irrespective of Hizballah’s actions, because of Israeli and US intentions. Hizballah’s error was that, while it concluded already in 2000 that Israel would eventually return to Lebanon to wipe out the stain of its defeat and while Hizballah had been preparing for this for the past six years, it didn’t realise the moment was so close at hand. Thus, although it had no idea 12 July would lead to war, and would not have authorised the attack if it did, with hindsight the fact that the war occured when and how it did saved Lebanon from a much bigger – more or less imminent – calamity.
— Because Hizballah did not believe 12 July would result in war and would not have launched the attack if it did, it is out of the question that it was acting on behalf of Iran or Syria. It was an Israeli war, and could not possibly have been a Hizballah/Syrian/Iranian one, for the simple reason that it was unanticipated.
Additionally, given the extent to which Nasrallah has been presenting this as a strategic victory, I think it is highly unlikely that he intended his words to be understood as an apology or admission of a strategic error on Hizballah’s part. Seen in their full context, I think Nasrallah was claiming that 1) Hizballah does not play chess with the lives of Lebanese or the interests of the state, 2) while an error was made, it turned out to Hizballah as well as Lebanon’s advantage.

By the way, commenter Lisette also flagged this piece of reporting, by Patrick Bishop in today’s London Daily Telegraph, in which Bishop writes that Nasrallah, “became one of the most widely admired leaders in the Middle East overnight after a broadcast in which he impressed audiences of all persuasions… ”
Bishop wrote, as I had done on that earlier JWN post, that Nasrallah seemed to use much of the interview to reassure his Lebanese viewers that Hizbullah was eager to preserve the present ceasefire, and that it did not seek to transform Lebanon into an Islamic Republic (at least, not any time soon.) He noted, with regard to that last point, that Nasrallah “chose to give the interview to the liberal, secular New TV station, rather than to his propaganda outlet, al Manar, and the questioner was a woman journalist, Maryam al Bassam.”
Anyway, thanks to Rabbani and all who have helped provide us with more information about, and more context regarding, the t.v. interview.
But hey, if anyone can get hold of a complete trasncript of it, in Arabic or even better in English, please post that URL pronto onto the comments here.

I just found this fascinating “autobiography” of Hassan Nasrallah on the web.
It was apparently published August 10 by Ya Lesarat Ol-Hoseyn (Tehran), described as “in Persian — extremely conservative Tehran weekly. Organ of Ansar-e Hezbollah”.
It would be good to have someone go through it and re-render all the mangled Lebanese place-names into ones that are recognizably Lebanese. For example, near the beginning there, “Qarantina”, “Bourj Hamoud”, “Nab’aa”, etc…
Qarantina and Nab’aa were two of a number of majority-Shiite areas of East Beirut that were completely “ethnically cleansed” of their Shiite residents during January 1976 by those lovely democrats (strong irony alert!) of the so-called “Lebanese Front”. Hasan N. would have been 15 at the time. He writes in Ya Lesarat, quite blandly, “Hence, I left [Karantina] and returned, along with my family, to the village of Bazuyeh, where I was born. After that, I finished my high school education in one of the state schools of the coastal city of Sur.”
We don’t, alas, know when these recollections were penned. I found these paras very interesting:

In 1992, the Israelis assassinated Seyyed Abbas Musa [a.k.a. Abbas Musawi, who’d been secretary-general of Hizbullah till then]. Hence, the members of the Consultative Council arranged a meeting to choose his successor, which turned out to be me. The day I was chosen by the Consultative Council, I had a lot of fear and anxiety, because I was much younger then. Up to that point I had only been in charge of the internal arrangements of the party and I had no experience with the party’s external affairs. But, the council insisted that I take the job. At first, I refused, but later, when the experts insisted again, I accepted this responsibility finally.
In 1978, I married Ms. Fatemeh Yasin from the Abbasiyeh neighborhood of the city of Sur. Besides my son Hadi, who was martyred at the age of 18, I have three other children: Muhammad Javad; Zeynab; and Muhammad Ali. When I set foot in my house, I leave all of my work and difficulties at the door, in order to become a caring husband and father at home. I try to value my private life and my faith. I read a lot, especially about the adventures of politicians. I have been reading Sharon’s biography for a while now, and I am going to read the book again.
… I would not deny that Hizballah’s wish is to establish an Islamic Republic system one day, because Hizballah believes that establishing an Islamic government is the only way to bring stability to a society and is the only way to settle social differences, even in a society that is composed of numerous minorities. Nevertheless, establishing an Islamic Republic is not possible with force and resistance. It requires a national referendum. A referendum that wins 51 percent of the vote is still not the solution. What it needs is a referendum for which 90 percent of the people vote. Hence, with this assumption, and in view of the status quo, establishing an Islamic Republic system in Lebanon is not possible at the present time.
Death is nothing but a gateway between the two worlds. Some people pass through this gateway with difficulty and agony, and some do it with ease and willingness. Martyrdom is the best way of passing to the eternal world, because martyrdom is one of the glorious gifts of god almighty. When a martyr dies (moves from one place to another), it is like a person who goes to the heavens with precious gifts. This is why martyrdom is so valuable to other people (Muslims). Even in those nations that do not believe in god, when people dedicate their lives for their homeland, their nation, and a goal in which they believe, it is laudable and admirable. As a father who has lost his son, I have no worries; I am sure that my son is in paradise with god almighty.
Before his martyrdom, Hadi’s picture was only found in our house. However, today his picture is found everywhere and in every house. It is true that my family and I have lost our dear and beloved son, but we are confident that we will meet him in the eternal life some day.

Anyway, there’s a lot more there that’s worth reading, too. It gives a much fuller picture of Nasrallah than I was able to provide in my BR piece on Hizbullah last year.
Hat-tip to Democratic Underground for having pinpointed the Ya Lesarat piece. If only they had an accessible comments board I would have thanked them there in person.

I’ve been pulling together materials for a big article on the whole 33-day war that I need to write for Boston Review this week, and guess what, Nasrallah comes out with his big almost-mea culpa this afternoon.
Naharnet reports it thus:

“We did not think, even one percent, that the capture [of two Israeli solderis on July 12] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not,” he said in an interview with New TV station.

Hizbullah’s own Arabic-language website doesn’t have that same exact wording (and they don’t have any version of this on their English site yet.) But both these versions were reporting on a verbal interview Nasrallah gave to New TV, which could explain the small discrepancies. Anyway, for now I’m happy to go with the pre-translated Naharnet version.
I’ve been trying to figure out his motivation in making what could be read as a fairly damaging admission of the Hizbullah leadership having taken a very momentous decision based on a deeply flawed judgment regarding Israel’s likely response.
Of course, way back in the middle of the war– or even before the middle of it– a second-level Hizbullah cadre had also said in public that “we never expected an Israeli response of this magnitude.” So the argument had already been field-tested, as it were.
But really, what would Nasrallah hope to be gaining from making this admission in his own name now?
I’m guessing two things:

(1) In the rest of the interview, he is extremely careful to portray Hizbullah as very cautious and determined not to over-react, even to any blatant Israeli provocations. (For example, in the New TV interview he also said, “If the Lebanese army encounters any armed person, it has the right to confiscate their weapons.”) But some fellow-Lebanese might justifiably argue that his present “cautious” stance is non-credible, given the recklessness with which he acted on July 12. So now he’s trying to tell them that Hizbullah honestly didn’t believe they were acting in a reckless way July 12.
(2) Also, as so often in the past, he is expressing a point of view that is studiedly modest and humble. He doesn’t quite come out and say, “We made a ghastly mistake.” Far less does he say to the Lebanese who have suffered so greatly from the war, “We are really sorry about that.” On the other hand, Hizbullah has been doling out large contributions and has made a huge commitment to the rebuilding effort– which could, perhaps, be seen as offering “reparations” for the war damage that the soldier-capture op of July 12 indirectly brought down upon their heads…

Please note here that I do not think for a minute, and am not trying to argue, that Hizbullah should be held responsible for the damage that the Israeli military caused to Lebanon and its people. Israel’s military and its national command authorities must be held fully responsible for their own actions, including for the horrendous damage and suffering those actions inflicted on the Lebanese people, and for the decisions they had knowingly made to take those actions. Many other avenues were open to them after the soldier-capture of July 12, but they knowingly chose from among those options the one that was probably the most lethal and destructive option.of all of them. (Hizbullah can and should be held responsible for the damage it caused in Israel.)
Anyway, Nasrallah’s eagerness to reassure his compatriots that Hizbullah intends to to act very cautiously in the coming period is evidently connected to his continued desire to work very closely indeed with the lawful government of Lebanon.
This alliance has been paying off very well for Hizbullah over the past five weeks or so. UN chief Kofi Annan confirmed on Friday that the beefed-up UNIFIL force will not be stationed along the Lebanese-Syrian border to interdict arms shipments coming in to Hizbullah, as Israel and the US had wanted it to be. But as Resolution 1701 stated, UNIFIL would only undertake such missions “at the request of the Lebanese government” (Art.14)… And the Lebanese government has made quite clear that it is not about to request that.
And on Friday, PM Fouad Siniora said this to Canadian Broadcasting about the goal of disarming Hizbullah:

it will be “through dialogue, through co-operation,” with Hezbollah that the goal of no weapons in the region is achieved.
“It’s not a matter of disarming. It’s through dialogue that we have to reach that point. And I think this can be achieved while at the same time you see, trying to find out how to integrate the numbers of Hezbollah that want to really get integrated within the Lebanese army,” he said.

So, there’s the first post-July 12 mention I’ve found of that older idea of folding Hizbullah’s fighters into the national army. It is not such a crazy idea, at all. After all, how did South Africa end the insurgency that the ANC’s military had launched against it? How did Mozambique end the insurgency that Renamo’s (extremely rights-abusing) military had launched against it? Why, by integrating the fighters from the former opposition forces into a reconceived national army, that’s how.
(Let me tell you, too, that the Renamo Special Forces had committed atrocities far, far worse than anything that anyone in Hizbullah has ever been accused of: mutilations, tortures, child-abductions, sexual enslavement, etc etc… But once the peace agreement was reached, the guy who’d been head of those Special Forces became head of training for the intergrated national army; he did a good job there, then quit to go to law school and get a law degree. I interviewed him in Maputo in 2003, and was disarmed to find him extremely articulate and thoughtful… )
Anyway, that’s by the by.
In a comment I put onto this discussion yesterday afternoon, I’d noted that during the 33-day war,

[Nasrallah] and the Olmert government were both fighting for exactly the same thing: the loyalty of the Lebanese government to their respective projects.
He won, I think.

But I also think he’s being very attentive to making sure that that victory doesn’t slip out of his hands.
I just want to bookmark a couple more things before I go to bed…
One is a snippet from this Daily Star article from yesterday or today, which could throw additional light on how the Hizbullah leaders were interpreting Israel’s actions once they understood that Olmert was mounting a n unexpectedly large assault against them after the July 12 op. It’s some quotes from Hizbullah’s deputy secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem:

“We were expecting the Israelis would respond at the most by bombing for a day or two or some limited attacks or targeting certain places, such that it would not go beyond three days and some limited damage,” Qassem told An-Nahar daily [publ. August 26.]
Instead, Israel bombed Hizbullah targets and Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure for over a month in a war which displaced more than 900,000 people.
Two days after the war began, Hizbullah learned that Israel and the United States had been planning an attack in September or October, he said. “Israel was not ready. In fact it wanted to prepare for two or three months more, but American pressure on one side and the Israeli desire to achieve a success on the other … were factors which made them rush into battle,” Qassem said.

And the other important thing to bookmark is this oped from the WaPo of friday August 25. It’s by Yoram Peri, who used to work for Davar, and who is a very good analyst of civilian-military relations in Israel. (His book From Bullets to Ballots, which was a study of the incredibly heavy role former generals had played in the Israeli political system, was published by Cambridge University Press in the mid-1980s right after they published my book on the PLO.)
Anyway, in that oped, which is titled, Israel’s Broken Process, Peri writes:

The civil branch of Israel’s government and its decision-making machinery must be made strong enough to balance the military’s input. Otherwise, there will only be more events like the one this summer, in which no well-reasoned alternatives were presented to cabinet ministers to compete with the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) recommendation to embark on a broad campaign in Lebanon.
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.
Rectifying this situation is easier said than done…
The problems this summer stemmed from more than the generals’ traditional power. The circumstances were unusual. The IDF had a monopoly on intelligence. The country had an inexperienced prime minister and lacked a strong National Security Council. These things, along with other structural weaknesses in the machinery of civilian control of the military, resulted in a weak Israeli government that hastily bowed to the generals’ emphatically stated position…
The focus of controversy in coming weeks will not be whether the war was justified; the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including myself, are convinced it was. Rather, the question will be whether it was wise to opt for full-scale war as Israel’s response to the kidnapping of two soldiers. And if a military operation was indeed the appropriate response, what should have been its timing, nature and scope?
The military will undoubtedly draw the professional conclusions about this war, as it has in the past. The public will eventually punish the political leaders for their conduct of it. But Israel’s fundamental security posture will not improve until the pattern of relations between its generals and political leaders is dramatically altered and a better decision-making mechanism in national security matters is established.
Wars really are too serious a matter to be left to either fervent generals or weak politicians.

Well, there it is. I’m sure we’ll learn more details in the days ahead about the way the decision to launch the “massive retaliation” plan was taken back on July 12. But what Peri writes does confirm my own original hunch that it had been taken very hastily, without any time for due consideration either of any alternative plans, or of the chances this plan had of succeeding– and also (most likely) in a spirit of great emotionalism…

You’ll need to read Arabic to read
this
report from the respected Beirut Center for Research and Information. It
presents the results of an opinion poll carried out by the Center between
August 18 and August 20, with 800 respondents chosen for their representativity.

The questions are good ones, and I wish I had the time to translate them
all and the whole report here. If any commenters want to do a longer translation
of this report for me to put onto JWN, please gmail me (hcobban-at).

The first there question was “Do you consider that the resistance emerged
victorious from this war?” The responses came out at: 72% yes. (Broken down,
if you’re interested, as: 79.8% of Sunnis saying yes; 96.3% of Shias, 62.8%
of Druze, and 59.7% of Christians.)

If I were Nasrullah I’d be a bit worried about the softness of my support
among the Christians and Druze… but on the whole, given all that’s happened,
I’d feel pretty satisfied to have come this far with the poll numbers looking this
good.

If, on the other hand, I were Ehud Olmert, I would be extremely
worried about
these
very recent poll numbers in Israel. (Were they of all Israelis, or just of
“Jewish Israelis”, as that country’s opinion polls so frequently are, I wonder?)
Anyway, that report tells us this:

Some 74 per cent of Israelis asked thought Olmert’s performance during
the month-long war was ‘bad’, and 63 per cent said he should resign as a
result, said the poll commissioned by the biggest-selling Yediot Ahronot
daily.

Clausewitz 101: “War is an extension of politics by other means.” I.e.,
what really counts is the political outcome, not the kill ratios or other
metrics of physical damage caused.

At the level of politics we now have Nasrallah supported by 72% of his
public and Olmert supported by either 37 or 26 percent of his (depending
what you look at.)

And the winner is— ?

By the way, re the continuing leadership chaos in Israel, let me just
reiterate my previous warning:

The disunity in Israel’s national command authorities could allow some
devastating military adventurism to arise there. This, in a country with
(by conservative estimates) some 100 to 200 nuclear warheads…

Please, will the adults in the international community pay attention
to this risk and exert all possible efforts to end the long-festering irresolution
of three vital strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict before things get even
worse?