Category: Lebanon

How can Israeli civilians be protected from Hizbullah shelling?

Over on this JWN discussion board, Israeli commenter JES and I (and others) have been having a good discussion. In particular, JES asked, “What might have constituted a ‘proportionate’ response to the shelling of Israeli civilians?”, and that question provoked a useful and informative further discussion.
I do admit, though, that in my contributions to this discussion, I did not answer the specific question that JES asked. After all, how could we even start a discussion as to whether Israel’s killing of 800-plus Lebanese civilians might be considered “proportionate” to Israel’s having suffered 39 civilian deaths from the 33 days of Hizbullah shelling? To even enter such a discussion would be obscene. Would the killing of just 39 Lebanese civilians been ‘proportional’? Or what other ratio, other than that of pure human equality, might we seek to put on the value of a Lebanese life as per that of an Israeli life?
Actually, how about killing ‘zero’ other civilians, anywhere, being the best response to the killing of one’s own civilian compatriots? Or even, not killing anyone– soldier or civilian– but addressing one’s grievances (as the UN Charter and good sense both urge) through a strong pursuit of diplomacy?
So instead of getting into his ‘proportionality’ argument re Israel’s truly horrible civilian casualties, I reframed the question in my own mind to be one that asked the completely legitimate question of how, indeed, might Israel’s society and leaders best seek to ensure that Israeli civilians are not once again subjected to Hizbullah’s scary shelling of some Israeli civilian communities?
I know that a lot of Israelis are asking themselves this question right now. (And believe me, on the Lebanese side, a lot of Lebanese are asking how their society might also best be protected from any repeat of the terrible harm that Israeli inflicted on it during the 33-day war.)
Looking at this question now, I want to make one first broad and very important argument: The lives and wellbeing of Israelis and of all their neighbors will surely best be assured in the context of a sustainable and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. That has to be, surely, what we all work for! Absent that, seemingly “small” incidents like the Hizbullah operations of July 12 — or like the incursion that Israel launched deep into Lebanon just a few days ago– will always have the potential of jack-knifing the whole region back into a paroxysm of ghastly, ghastly violence.
Thank God the ceasefire of August 14 seems so far to have been sticking remarkably well… But we can’t rest on our laurels. Efforts for the broader Arab-Israeli peace (as called for in the ceasefire resolution) still need to be redoubled.
Pending that, though what we have in the Israeli-Lebanese theater is a situation of mutual military deterrence. Highly asymmetrical (in Israel’s favor), but still, mutual. Hizbullah is certainly acting as though it is deterred from renewing its lobbing of any of its rockets into Israel; and Israel is acting, for now, as though it is deterred from launching any resumption of the large-scale destructive operations that it mounted against Lebanon right up to the time of the coming-into-force of the August 14 ceasefire. It is evidently not any threat of punitive action by any other forces– whether the Lebanese Army or UNIFIL– that has achieved the general calm the region has seen since August 14. It has been mutual deterrence.
(Such a situation can certainly always be built upon, by diplomats of vision and good intent, if they want to achieve a sustainable resolution of the conflict in question… as per the transformation of the US-Soviet relationship from one of mutual deterrence to one of peace, cooperation, and cooperative threat reduction. But in the Lebanese-Israeli case this will also, necessarily, involve Israel making peace with Syria as well as with Lebanon.)
In the meantime, so long as both parties– the IDF and Hizbullah– still retain the power to inflict significant harm on each other’s “home communities”, then we should hope that the ceasefire holds, and becomes as much strengthened as possible. Let’s underline here that Hizbullah did completely cease the shelling of Israeli civilians the moment the ceasefire went into effect August 14 (and previously, during the 48-hour humanitarian pause called by the UN, Hizbullah had– unlike Israel– ceased its cross-border attacks almost completely.)
Since August 14, Hizbullah has maintained its discipline re refraining from shelling Israel. This, even after the eruption of a couple of small, localized firefights in contested areas of the south (one of which left four Hizbullah fighters dead), and even after the IDF’s pathetic botched incursion into that village north of Baalbek a few days ago, which also I believe left some Hizbullah dead.
Let’s do some more underlining here: Hizbullah is notably NOT composed of a bunch of wild-eyed crazies who shell Israeli civilians for fun. They are a very disciplined body of armed men who use (and refrain from the use of) violence in a disciplined way and for clearly political purposes.
(As anyone would have learned who read the study I published on the organization last year.)
All the prima facie evidence– not just from the most recent war but from the whole history of IDF-Hizbullah encounters since 1993– clearly indicates that concluding a ceasefire agreement with Hizbullah, even if the negotiations for this are only indirect, is a very effective way for Israel to protect civilians from the threat of being shelled or otherwise attacked from Lebanon.
The fact that Israel (and the US) worked so hard and so long to delay the conclusion of a ceasefire agreement in the recent war– during long weeks in which the government of Lebanon, with the concurrence of Hizbullah, were actively working for one– means that the governments of Israel and the US must bear a lot of responsibility for all the pain and suffering that happened during that period when they were delaying the ceasefire.
I want to re-examine, too, the longer chronology of the many interactions between these two fighting parties. (And thanks to commenter Vadim, who provided the link to the George Monbiot article I shall consider next. It clarified considerably for me some of the precise points about what happened on July 12 that earlier I had apparently gotten wrong. I apologize for that. I was on vacation in France at the time and had lousy access to the news.)
Monbiot has pored through past UNIFIL reports and come up with this brief summary of the 2000-2006 period:

    Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been hundreds of violations of the “blue line” between the two countries. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that Israeli aircraft crossed the line “on an almost daily basis” between 2001 and 2003, and “persistently” until 2006. These incursions “caused great concern to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas”. On some occasions, Hezbollah tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft guns.
    In October 2000, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) shot at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators on the border, killing three and wounding 20. In response, Hezbollah crossed the line and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. On several occasions, Hezbollah fired missiles and mortar rounds at IDF positions, and the IDF responded with heavy artillery and sometimes aerial bombardment. Incidents like these killed three Israelis and three Lebanese in 2003; one Israeli soldier and two Hezbollah fighters in 2005; and two Lebanese people and three Israeli soldiers in February 2006.
    Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel several times in 2004, 2005 and 2006, on some occasions by Hezbollah. But, the UN records, “none of the incidents resulted in a military escalation”.
    On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad — Nidal and Mahmoud Majzoub — were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of Sidon. This was widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. In June, a man named Mahmoud Rafeh confessed to the killings and admitted that he had been working for Mossad since 1994. Militants in southern Lebanon responded, on the day of the bombing, by launching eight rockets into Israel. One soldier was lightly wounded.
    There was a major bust-up on the border, during which one member of Hezbollah was killed and several wounded, and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the border region “remained tense and volatile”, Unifil says it was “generally quiet” until July 12.

Regarding this last judgment, see para 2 of this UNIFIL report, which says: “The situation in the UNIFIL area of operation remained tense and volatile, although it was generally quiet during most of the reporting period [ i.e., since January 21, 2006]. This situation completely changed on 12 July, when the current hostilities broke out and the area was plunged into the most serious conflict in decades.”
So then, on July 12, what happened? Para 3 of the UNIFIL report says this:

    The crisis started when, around 9 a.m. local time, Hizbollah launched several rockets from Lebanese territory across the withdrawal line (the so-called Blue Line) towards Israel Defense Forces (IDF) positions near the coast and in the area of the Israeli town of Zarit. In parallel, Hizbollah fighters crossed the Slue Line into Israel and attacked an IDF patrol. Hizbollah captured two IDF soldiers, killed three others and wounded two more. The captured soldiers were taken into Lebanon. Subsequent to the attack on the patrol, a heavy exchange of fire ensued across the Blue Line between Hizbollah and IDF. While the exchange of fire stretched over the entire length of the Line, it was heaviest in the areas west of Bint Jubayl and in the Shab’a farms area. Hizbollah targeted IDF positions and Israeli towns south of the Blue Line. Israel retaliated by ground, air and sea attacks. In addition to airstrikes on Hizbollah positions, IDF targeted numerous roads and bridges in southern Lebanon within and outside the UNIFIL area of operations. IDF has stated that those attacks were to “prevent Hizbollah from transferring the abducted soldiers”. At least one IDF tank and an IDF platoon crossed into Lebanon in the area of the Hizbollah attack in an attempt to rescue the captured soldiers. An explosive device detonated under the tank, killing four more IDF soldiers. An eighth IDF soldier was reportedly killed in fighting that ensued during an attempt to retrieve the four bodies. That night, the IDF issued a warning to UNIFIL that any person – including United Nations personnel – moving close to the Blue Line would be shot at.

I might disagree with the wording there in one respect: to describe only the IDF’s shelling as “retaliatory” is, I think to be very one-sided.
But my conclusion from looking at this general record is to judge that when Hizbullah’s leadership decided to undertake the operations of July 12 they were (1) knowingly violating, by their shelling of the Israeli civilian areas of that morning– even if that shelling was intended mainly as a a tactic to divert the IDF’s attention from the soldier-snatch operation– the general agreement that had existed since 1996, under which both sides agreed to restruct their operations to purely military targets, but also probably, (2) doing so with some expectation that Israel’s response, while tough, might yet be similar to the scale of earlier exchanges that had occurred since 2000.
But Olmert’s response was, as we now well know, in no way commensurate with the kinds of exchanges that had taken place over the preceding six years…
So now, looking at the generally chronology above, let’s ask again when where the periods in which Israeli civilians were most secure and when were they least secure? The answer, surely, has to be that they were most secure when Israel had a working ceasefire on the ground, with Hizbullah, in Lebanon.
Mutual deterrence: It’s not a satisfactory situation to live under over the long term. But where it provides for calm, it sure beats the carnage that we saw over the past 7 weeks.

More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians

Bob Fisk, writing in today’s Independent, gives these details about the fateful “Marjayoun convoy” of August 11:

    “They went so slowly, I was enraged,” a relief worker recalls. “People at friendly villages would come out and give the refugees food and water and want to talk to them and people would stop to greet old friends as if this was tourism. The convoy was only going at five miles an hour. It was getting dark.” The 3,000 refugees now trailed up the Bekaa after nightfall and were approaching the ancient Kifraya vineyards at Joub Jannine when disaster struck them at 8pm.
    “The first bomb hit the second car,” Karamallah Dagher, a reporter for Reuters, said. “I was half way back down the road and my friend Elie Salami was standing there, asking me if I had any spare gasoline. That’s when the second missile struck and Elie’s head and shoulders were blown away. His daughter Sally is 16 and she jumped from the car and cried out: ‘I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy.’ But he was gone.” Speaking of the killings yesterday, Dagher breaks down and cries. He tried to carry his arthritic mother from his own car but she complained that he was hurting her so he put her back in the passenger seat and sat beside her, waiting for a violent death which mercifully never came. But it arrived for Collette Makdissi al-Rashed, wife of the mukhtar, who was beheaded in her Cherokee jeep, and for a member of the Tahta family from from Deir Mimas, and for two other refugees, and for a Lebanese soldier and for 35-year-old Mikhael Jbaili, the Red Cross volunteer from Zahle, who was blasted into the air when a rocket exploded behind him.
    “There was panic,” the Marjayoun mayor, Fouad Hamra, said…

(Hat-tip to Judy for sending that link.)
I haven’t heard any more yet from Colette’s family… I imagine they’ve been busy arranging the funeral and many other things.
Colette was originally from Zahleh, just a few miles further up the Beqaa Valley from the Joub Jannine vineyards. I imagine Zahleh was where the convoy was headed, since the town traditionally had many links with Marjayoun.
I fully support all efforts to conduct an in-depth investigation into how exactly Colette, Elie, and the others were thus murdered, and by whom. In the piece linked to above, Fisk writes:

    There are those who break down when they recall the massacre at Joub Jannine – and there are the Israelis who gave permission to the refugees to leave Marjayoun, who specified what roads they should use, and who then attacked them with pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft. Five days after being asked to account for the tragedy, they had last night still not bothered to explain how they killed at least seven refugees and wounded 36 others just three days before a UN ceasefire came into effect.

(In fact, at that point on that Friday evening, the negotiations for the ceasefire were already very far advanced, indeed, almost at completion.)
Fisk tells us it was “pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft” that fired on the convoy. “Pilotless” is a bit of misnomer. Drones don’t have pilots sitting in them; but they do have pilots who sit safely back in some home base and give the drones all their orders, including where to steer to, how to take pictures, and when and where to fire their weapons. It’s not like the Israelis (or Americans, over in Iraq) simply send out squads of killer drones and sit back and let them do whatever they want.
So who were the pilots or controllers of those drones, that evening? On what basis did they command the drones to fire their lethal missiles? What were the “rules of engagement” (or “standing orders”) on the basis of which they fired? Who had defined those standing orders or ROEs? That is what we need to know.
We need to know these things so we can understand more fully the mindset of people who would fire on a completely pre-arranged convoy of civilians heading north up the Beqaa, (with, yes, ahead of them, Lebanese Army people retreating north as per agreement with the IDF, rendering them hors de combat, i.e. under international law ‘noncombatants’.)
Has it become quite “normal” for people in the Israeli armed forces– particularly, their Air Force– to fire on civilians and other noncombatants who are clearly fleeing the battle zone? What does this tell us about the ethics and value of the Israeli armed forces and the society they claim to represent and defend?
Amnesty International has just published an excellent-looking report on the attacks the IDF (and particularly the IAF) launched during the 33-day war against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. It is certainly worth reading in full.
In a separate campaign, Amnesty is also calling for immediate investigation of all attacks launched against civilian persons during the war. It notes that,

    In Lebanon, hundreds of civilians were killed by Israeli forces in attacks on residential areas causing massive destruction. Others were killed in attacks on vehicles as villagers were heeding the calls by the Israeli army to leave their homes in South Lebanon… In Israel, some 40 civilians were killed in attacks by Hizbullah on towns and villages, including Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Safed, Ma’alot and Acre…”

Yes, it would be good to have a broad, even-handed international investigation into the killing of civilian persons (and the destruction of civilian infrastructure) by both sides. There are, of course, a number of issues involved in any such consideration of “evenhandedness”. One is the massive disproportionality between the lethality and the general destructive capability at the disposal of each side. I would love for someone to come up with rough figures for e.g. the total (kilo-)tonnage of TNT-equivalent that was delivered by each side… All we ever hear about in the US is the “thousands” of Hizbullah rockets that zoomed into Israel– without any easily comparable reference to either the number or the explosive capacity of the Israeli munitions (air-dropped, sea-delivered, artillery, etc) that were targeted onto Lebanon.
And when I say “targeted” onto Lebanon, that brings up an additional disparity in capacity between the two sides: the one regarding targeting capability. On the one hand, we have Israel, whose spokespeople routinely claim they are able to bomb with “pinpoint accuracy”– a claim that is, indeed, generally a credible one, even when, say, they’re boming a convoy of noncombatants driving north up the Beqaa, a vital bridge or a power station north of Beirut, or a gathering of other refugees in Qana, etc…
And then there’s Hizbullah.
I know that Hizbullah was able to target one anti-ship missile onto an Israeli navy ship fairly early on, and it also has a very primitive drone capability (not used much, I think, during the recent war.) But the vast majority of those much-hyped “thousands of Hizbullah rockets” launched against israel were (a) of very low explosive power, and (b) barely targettable at all.
“Pipsqueakers”, as Michael Totten has called them.
Here’s what Totten, a strongly pro-Israeli commentator from Oregon, wrote after he toured one of the worst affected “front-line communities” in Israel last Friday:

    I drove to Hezbollah’s most targeted city of Kiryat Shmona to do a little post-war analysis of what had just happened. It looks surprisingly intact from a distance, and even up close the damage is less severe than what I thought it would be.
    I expected to see at least one destroyed house. There may be a destroyed house in there somewhere, but I drove all over and couldn’t find one.
    Katyusha rockets are pipsqueakers    . They don’t feel like pipsqueakers when they’re flying in your direction. But they are. They can’t be aimed worth a damn, and they’ll only do serious damage if they ignite something else after impact, like the gas tank of a car. They have almost no military value at all unless they are fired in barrages at a reasonably close range. From a distance they can only be counted on to break a few things almost at random in the general direction they’re aimed.
    They do break a few things, especially because Hezbollah is clever enough to pack them tight with ball bearings. Kiryat Shmona looks like a city that recently suffered street fights between roving militias with automatic weapons.
    Katyusha shrapnel kills people who aren’t wearing body armor, and wounds those who are. No one wants to be hit with this stuff. But if the side of your building is hit, you can call a repair guy and have it taken care of in one day.

A little different from those entire city-blocks of densely packed high-rises in southern Beirut that were reduced to a level field of smoking rubble by the IDF’s stand-off weapons, don’t you think?
Well, back to Amnesty’s report on Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian infratsructure (including infrastructure literally vital to the survival of civilians, like water plants, etc.) It included this:

Continue reading “More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians”

Haunting Images from Israel

Maybe I’m still too human. I resist viewing the many available web pictures of death in Lebanon and Israel in the recent carnage – even as my head tells me I must. As noted here before, the American viewing public had a profoundly sanitized version of the Israeli pounding of Lebanon, while the rest of the world witnessed a steady horrific stream of Lebanese civilian corpses, like the 3 dozen or so children who perished (again) at Qana.
My hesitance stems from analytical awareness of the power of such images to change thinking, unfairly at times, if we do not know the context of a sensational picture. Inevitably, images can be powerful tools, for good or ill, shaping international opinion of a given event. Contrary to Tony Cordesman, that’s why “smart” combatants today energetically endeavor to promote, repress, or sugar coat horrific images to suit their side’s agenda.
Never mind the cerebral level, the pictures from the past six weeks in Lebanon remain – a testament powerfully tugging at the heart and soul, for those with the courage to look. Such a waste!
Yet it wasn’t images of carnage that awoke me last night – like Jefferson’s “firebell in the night.” Instead, I am especially haunted by the memory of very different type of photo that I first saw here and then here.
No, they are not of dead children soaked in blood or caked in chemical ash, and they’re not the images of the broken “ragdoll” bodies of someone’s now departed, beloved child.
The pictures that eat at me even worse than the sight of death are of otherwise cherubic Israeli children writing messages and drawing images on Israeli shells bound for Lebanon.
One side of me still wanted to believe that there has to be an explanation, that these have to be doctored, or even fabricated, or explained away. I wish.
From the checking I’ve done, the photos are indeed legitimate, and different versions of the same scene apparently were taken by different photo services (AP, AFP, Ha’aretz, etc.) on July 17th.
While I am far better at searching for texts and documents via venerable tools like Nexus and Dow, I have a hunch that the original publisher/owners of these photos are shy, at best, about these photos, as I’ve encountered several no longer functioning photo links. Yet I am also learning that several reputable photo web site blogs have featured the photos and now store them in “permanent” links, such as via “Flikr.” See here, here, and here.
I’ve read claims that these photos have been the focus of scores (or more) of blog write-ups. However, it is my sense that the US mainstream media, TV and print, has generally ignored the photos. (Readers please chime in if you have any examples to the contrary.)
Responding to an internet buzz about the photos, no less than the Jerusalem Post (on-line only) on July 23rd sourced Israeli officials to confirm that the “graffitti incident” really did occur, that the photos were of an actual event. Indeed, the Associated Press photos were apparently taken by an Israeli photojournalist, Sebastian Scheiner.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army did not condone the children’s shell decorating session. Then again, they obviously did not stop it. The Post cited an un-named official close to Israel’s public relations campaign who said that there was “no way” to frame the incident in a positive light. “Some people are simply irresponsible,” said the official.
That hasn’t stopped some from trying to “spin” it.

Continue reading “Haunting Images from Israel”

Shocking news

I just heard from Huda Rashed, the Lebanese second cousin of two of my children, that her mother Colette Rashed was one of those killed when the Israeli Air Force bombed a convoy of civilians (and departing Lebanese Army people) from Marjayoun on Friday, August 11.
I am still devastated.
You can read here my account of the visit Bill and I made in October 2004 to Colette’s family home in Marjayoun.
Colette was a warm and talented woman. She worked as a teacher while raising and supporting her family under all the terrible conditions of life the people of Marjayoun have known since 1978. For a long while, that also involved the family living in exile in Dubai. Her older daughter became part of the Lebanese diaspora in Ivory Coast, which of course was also badly affected by the fighting there some months ago.
I gather that Colette’s family and also the families of other convoy participants murdered in this way are determined to get to the bottom of how the order to fire on the convoy was given, and by whom. Prior to the convoy setting out, UNIFIL had received explicit permission from the IDF for it to do so, with its route all well signaled and agreed with the Israelis.
So many civilians were killed in this war! Some 800 in Lebanon and 39 in Israel. Each and every one had a tragic story like this one… but this one strikes home for me in a special way.
I will just underline, though this does not need doing, that Colette and her family are all Christian Lebanese. They had no particular sympathy for Hizbullah– indeed, quite possibly some remaining feelings of resentment against them… But the most important thing is that they were Lebanese citizens who loved their hometown and their country, and wanted to be left simply to live at peace in it. In Colette’s case, Israel didn’t even let her live.

Cordesman on Iran-Hizbullah ‘link’

Anothiny Cordesman, who holds the “Arleigh Burke Chair” (whatever that is) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, is a well-known face on US television and much quoted on Middle East strategic affairs in the print media, too. He is a generally very professional strategic analyst, with a non-ideological approach that leads him to express strategic truths and judgments in an even-handed, objective way. (Which has frequently, in the past, raised the ire of the more ideological among Israel’s supporters in the US.)
Recently, though– and I’d love to know whether this was before or after July 12– the American Jewish Committee invited Cordesman on a special, very “insider-y” trip to Israel. (Who paid? Tell us, Tony!) In his usual workmanlike fashion, he has already, today, published a “working draft” of a study titled Preliminary Lessons of Israeli-Hezbollah War. It is interesting, primarily because of the window it offers into what he heard during, as he writes, a “trip made it possible to visit the front and to talk with a number of senior Israeli officers and experts.”
His most notable finding of all is this one, buried at the bottom of p.15 of the report:

    One key point that should be mentioned more in passing than as a lesson, although it may be a warning about conspiracy theories, is that no serving Israeli official, intelligence officer, or other military officer felt that the Hezbollah acted under the direction of Iran or Syria.

Why should we mention that “only in passing”, Tony? Your observation there does, after all, undercut just about all the pro-Israeli hasbara (spin) to which we’ve been subjected here in the US MSM over the past six weeks…
Elsewhere in his report, Cordesman probably more than returns the generosity the AJC showed in arranging his trip by engaging in some deliberate obfuscation about the degree to which the Israeli military engaged in “restraint” and “proportionality” during its actions in Lebanon. (See p.13.)
The text also includes this pair of howlers, halfway down p.10:

    Hezbollah … used Lebanon’s people and civilian areas as both defensive and offensive weapons.[Excuse me– how did they use Lebanon’s people and civilian areas as “offensive weapons”?? I’d love to find out more…] Israel certainly saw this risk from the start. While the Hezbollah did attack Lebanese civilian targets early in the war, [What the heck is he talking about here? I’m assuming “Hezbollah” there was a mistype for “Israel”?] these were generally limited. It did establish procedures for screening strike requirements and intelligence review of possible civilian casualties and collateral damage…

Since this is only still a “draft”, perhaps those howlers could be corrected before a final version is prepared?
Anyway, I guess that for me, the main interest of Cordesman’s paper is the window it offers into (what passes as) the “strategic thinking” of Israel’s senior commanders during the war. For example, regarding what the government’s actual war goals were during the war, he writes this (p.3):

    Israeli decision makers have not provided a consistent picture of what the goals for the war were, or what they expected to accomplish within a given amount of time. [II’ll say!] A top Israeli official did, however, seem to sum up the views of these decision makers when he stated that Israel had five objectives in going to war:
    • Destroy the “Iranian Western Command” [I guess this is a reference to Hizbullah’s military capabilities?] before Iran could go nuclear.
    • Restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence after the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000
    and Gaza in 2005, and countering the image that Israel was weak and forced to leave.
    • Force Lebanon to become and act as an accountable state, and end the status of Hezbollah as a state within a state.
    • Damage or cripple Hezbollah, with the understanding that it could not be destroyed as a military force and would continue to be a major political actor in Lebanon. [Yes, well, that was fallback position for them, wasn’t it. In the first few days, there was lots of rhetoric about “destroying” Hizbullah’s military capability.]
    • Bring the two soldiers the Hezbollah had captured back alive without major trades in prisoners
    held by Israel—not the thousands demanded by Nasrallah and the Hezbollah.

He then goes on to make cleverly obfuscating judgments about what Israel actually “achieved” in each of these five areas… though the bottom line in each case was still “not very much, at all.”
On p.7 he writes, quite explicitly:

    If the Hezbollah is crippled as a military force, it will be because of US and French diplomacy in creating an international peacekeeping force and helping the Lebanese Army move south with some effectiveness. It will not be because of IDF military action.

Right. And the US and French diplomats have not, actually, been succeeding very well in that, have they?
I think I’ll cite in full here p.14 of the report, which expresses Cordesman’s “bottom line” judgment about the effectiveness of the strategy that Israel’s national command authorities pursued throughout the war:

Continue reading “Cordesman on Iran-Hizbullah ‘link’”

Hizbullah building bridges; Israel’s command authorities fracturing

I just read this Yahoo/AP news report about Lebanese Army units deploying to south Lebanon today, and I clicked onto the slideshow accompanying it. In a number of slides you can see the Army convoys crossing vital bridges across waterways that the Israelis three weeks ago pulverized with their air assault against the country’s infrastructure– and these crossing points had already been rebuilt with temporary but very serviceable-looking replacement structures.
E.g. here, you can see a rather nice-looking emergency bridge that has been put up over the Litani south of Tyr– at the point where just last week we saw desperate aid volunteers handing medical supplies to each across a raging torrent. (Look at the pic before that one, too.) Or this one, which shows the Army convoy crossing what is, I think, the strategically vital Jisr al-Khardali (Mustard Bridge), an area beneath Marjayoun that I know well.
So who do we suppose it was who built these emergency structures? I am almost certain it would have been engineers from Hizbullah’s long-practiced “Jihad al-Buna” (The Jihad of Building) organization.
Hizbullah builds many kinds of bridges, of course– political as well as physical. For example, Juan Cole links to an Arabic-language news report saying that Hizbullah leader Sayed Hasan Nasrullah has defended Lebanon’s “March 14” bloc against Bashar al-Asad’s accusation that they are all just Israeli and American tools.
Right now, Hizbullah’s need to keep good relations with the rest of the Lebanese government evidently outweighs its need to keep good relations with Bashar. Bashar, after all, is not about to cut them off at the knees. Indeed, his support for them will have to (in his own interest) continue and perhaps even grow over the weeks ahead, regardless of what Nasrullah says about him in public. But Nasrullah does need to keep a good working relationship with the March 14 bloc as he shoe-horns Hizbullah into the position he wants it to be in, in south Lebanon and the rest of the country, over the vital days and weeks ahead.
It’s probably worth reiterating that Nasrullah is an extremely astute and experienced political operator within intra-Lebanese politics. ( You can see some description of that in my Boston Review piece.)
Al-Hayat is only one of many newspapers that is reporting [Arabic] today on the deal between Hizbullah and the rest of the Lebanese government that has allowed the Lebanese Army’s rapid deployment to the south and a Hizbullah agreement to keep its weapons south of the Litani hidden (for now).
A future stage of this relationship might indeed involve– as often discussed previously– the incorporation of most or all Hizbullah units into the national army, perhaps in the form of a territorially based reserve or auxiliary force. At a minimum, such a force should have a single, unified command which comes under truly national Lebanese control.
(Interesting, in this context, to see this AP report of the Lebanese authorities having arrested a Lebanese general, Brig. Adnan Daoud, after he was seen on Israeli and Lebanese television last week, schmoozing and jovially drinking tea with Israeli occupation force officers who had just captured his barracks in Marjayoun. Lebanon has, of course, remained in a state of unresolved war with Israel since 1948, and has suffered horrendous damage from repeated Israeli attacks and incursions since 1968.)
Politicians in the west have been so happy in the past to see Lebanon gain its national independence from all foreign tutelage. So if the Lebanese government chooses to establish a territorial or auxiliary force in the way outlined above, then no foreign government would want to interfere with that nationally made decision, I assume?
… Gosh, the news just keeps pouring in, doesn’t it? Here, we learn that those fearsome French who were expected to “lead” or “be the backbone of” the beefed-up UN force are now reported by Le Monde as being prepared to contribute to it a princely “10 officers and 200 military engineers.”
This definitely looks more and more like Round One to Hizbullah. And of course, while Hizbullah’s leadership has been extremely carefully to do what it can to keep its version of “Lebanese national unity” flourishing, and while Hamas and Abu Mazen have also taken a significant new step toward Palestinian national unity, in Israel the highest levels of strategic and military decisionmaking seem to be falling into increasing discord amidst hails of cross-cutting accusations about responsibility for the failure of the 34-day war against Lebanon. (E.g., here and here.)
I do note, however, that 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?

Great military/strategic commentary from Pat Lang and Co.

Here’s AP this evening:

    Hundreds of Israeli soldiers walked out of Lebanon on Tuesday — some smiling broadly and pumping their fists, others weeping or carrying wounded comrades — as a cease-fire with Hezbollah solidified after a shaky start. The process was expected to accelerate over the coming days…
    Many of the infantry soldiers smiled with joy as they crossed back into Israel. Members of one unit carried a billowing Israeli flag. Some sang a traditional Hebrew song with the lyric: “We brought peace to you.” Others wept as they returned to their country, exhausted by the fighting.
    Some of the troops had been so disconnected from the news that they asked if Israel had managed to free two soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah on July 12 sparked the fighting. Israel had not. Several tanks headed back into Israel as well, including one that had been damaged and was being towed by a military bulldozer…

Here’s my fellow Virginian Col. Pat Lang, posting on his blog ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis 2006’, yesterday:

    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.
    Lee remained on the field a day after both Antietam and Gettysburg waiting to resume the fight. McClellan and Meade did not respond and Lee then moved away withdrawing to the south. He is thought to have been defeated in both battles although both could be argued to have been a “draw.”

I really have to put a link to Lang’s blog onto my sidebar here. He is a smart analyst of Middle Eastern military affairs and strategy.
As I understand it the main reason the IDF soldiers are flooding back into Israel is because they were all spread out in southern Lebanon and extremely vulnerable to renewed attacks from the Hizbullahis who remain embedded within the indigenous population of the region. Oh, also the IDF’s ground operations inside Lebanon had nearly all turned out to be a fiasco from start to finish, with the units ill-supplied and almost completely untrained in waging any kind of ground operations other than beating down the doors of cowering Palestinian families and staffing checkpoints throughout the whole West Bank. (See this great Akiva Eldar article on the IDF’s many problems.)
So yes, getting out fast maybe has been the better part of valor for them.
Meanwhile, South Lebanese who had earlier fled from the terror Israel was raining on them in their homes have been returning to their communities in a surge of slowly moving humanity. Hizbullah is from and of this population, so the pipe-dreams of the French, the Bushites, or other westerners who think that somehow they can build a Hizbullah-disavowing bastion among the South Lebanese will certainly remain just that.
(The people of South lebanon have had an earlier ugly experience with a too-zealous French component of UNIFIL before now, back in 1982, and rapidly sent it packing.)
Hizbullah knows how to rebuild war-shattered towns and villages, how to provide community services, how to meet the needs of the people. Their people have, after all, seen this movie of displacement and return, ruin and rebuilding, many times before over the past 28 years. All the western aid organizations are worlds behind them in trying to address the situation in the south.
Here’s another thing Lang writes in that post:

    What is clear is that Hizbullah’s forces remain in place all over the disputed zone and that its command and control of its forces remains effective. How can you know that? Easy. The day before the cease fire Hizbullah fired 250 rockets into Israel and since the cease fire has fired none. This represents unmistakable evidence of effective command.

Here, too, are some quotes on Hizbullah’s military effectiveness from my good friend Timur Goksel, former political advisor to UNIFIL in Lebanon:

    Goksel points out: “These people have been fighting the Israelis for eighteen years in south Lebanon. People forget that. They already know the Israelis. And they fought them when they occupied Lebanon and since then they have been preparing for a guerrilla war again.” In addition, Goksel highlights the remarkably dispersed nature of the Hizbollah guerrilla forces, which operate in small units with very little communication through to any overall chain of command. Much of what is done is according to previously agreed tactics; this makes it very difficult for the Israelis to disrupt communications because it is simply not very important for units to coordinate with each other or with a notional “centre”. (see “Hizbollah’s lack of structure its strength”, Asia Times, 10 August 2006).

And on Nasrallah:

    “He’s a very good student of everything to do with Israel: the politicians, the Army,” says Timur Goksel, a former senior adviser to the U.N. forces in Lebanon who has met the Hizbullah eader dozens of times. For religious guidance, Nasrallah relied increasingly on the heads of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he idolized, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in 1989 would become Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s spiritual leader and supreme political authority. In the 1980s, after Iran created Hizbullah to fight Israel’s troops in Lebanon, the militia also took up the struggle against Lebanon’s original Shiite movement, known as Amal. The two rival groups disagreed over the power of the ayatollahs and over which ones to follow. In 1988, skirmishes among the militias broke out into open combat—and Nasrallah was on Hizbullah’s front lines. “He was always on the ground with the fighters,” says Goksel, who was based with the United Nations in South Lebanon at the time. “They loved him for it. He has the full loyalty of the fighters from that time.” (see Babak Dehghanpisheh and Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek, Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue.)

(You can also see some interesting quotes from Goksel in my long Boston Review article on Hizbullah, last year.)

So what was this war all about, again?

Aluf Benn, writes in today’s Haaretz:

    Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday met with the parents of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldiers Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser and told them that Israel will negotiate with Hezbollah over their release. Defense Minister Amir Peretz also attended the meeting.
    Olmert gave the parents an update on the UN resolution and on the steps Israel is taking in order to release the three abducted soldiers (including IDF soldier Gilad Shalit abducted on the Gaza-Israel border). The prime minister said that Israel is doing its utmost to bring about the release of the two, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah on July 12 on Israel’s northern border.
    The UN resolution on cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon calls for the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, but is not included as a binding section in the resolution.
    A senior diplomatic source said Israel has no information on the fate of Regev and Goldwasser, but it is assumed they are still alive. The source said the IDF has launched high-risk operations to obtain information on the abductees, but they were all unsuccessful.
    The source said also that Israel did not condition the cease-fire on the release of the soldiers because it would have led to the continuation of the fighting and the loss of more life…

Olmert the humanitarian. (Irony alert, there.)
Well, I am delighted he has decided to subscribe to the UN ceasefire– even if only in his own very unsweet time. But imagine how much death, devastation, heartache, and hatred he could have avoided if he had decided to negotiate with Hizbullah on July 12 not August 12.
The tragedy of this is beyond words.
(There’s a lot more to say about today’s news. But I’m using my friend Ann Kerr’s landline to connect. I’m blocking her phone, and need to stop doing so. I rely on commenters to flesh out the picture here– thanks!)

Ceasefire resolution for Lebanon

Lebanon has a ceasefire resolution. I am happy that there is a chance of the killing being ended soon because of it– But this is clearly only a chance, since the Israeli government has said it won’t stop its military operations that are now pushing ever deeper into Lebanon until 7 a.m. local time Monday, at the earliest, and Hizbullah’s leader has said that Hizbullah will continue fighting as long as Israeli soldiers remained in Lebanon.
The Israeli forces don’t seem to be doing too well. Eleven have been killed inside Lebanon so far today, and “dozens” wounded. It looks as if the ground operations they’ve been undertaking have taken them into a series of well-prepared Hizbullah traps.
A poll conducted by Haaretz on Wednesday found that,

    Only 20 percent of respondents said that if the war ended today, it would be possible to declare Israel the winner. Some 30 percent said that Israel is losing, while 44 percent said that neither side is winning.
    However, many people said that they had trouble answering this question, as they lacked relevant data.
    Only 39 percent of the respondents backed the cabinet’s decision to expand the ground operation.

This does not look like good news for Olmert, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Hizbullah and its leader Sayed Hassan Nasrullah, has continued to increase throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds– mainly because of Hizbullah’s ability to keep fighting despite the month of extremely lethal Israeli assaults.
The text of the ceasefire resolution as passed still looks to me to be very favorable to Israel. One very good aspect of it is, of course, the call for a “full cessation of hostilities”– even if, in Israel’s case that is then described only as, “the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations.” But as we all know, everything Israel has done in Lebanon over the past month has been fully “defensive”– right? (Irony alert.)
The resolution, number 1701, also calls for a total Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, which is excellent. But again, it qualifies this by saying that upon full cessation of hostilities the government of Lebanon and Unifil should deploy their forces together throughout the South, and the government of Israel should, “as that deployment begins, … withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon in parallel.” In other words, it doesn’t call (as resolution 425 did, back in 1978) for Israel to withdraw “forthwith”… but it allows Israel to stay in Lebanon until UNIFIL is ready to deploy, alongside the Lebanese Army, into the south. Beefing up UNIFIL from its present troop level of 2,000 to its projected level of 15,000 will take some weeks.
For all that time the IOF is in Lebanon, there will be a very high risk of renewed fighting. Plus, what on earth further havoc might they wreak on the infrastructure in the areas under their control?
One of the many other problems with the resolution (as I read it on the BBC website) is that in clause 15 (a) it seems to forbid “the sale or supply to any entity or individual in Lebanon of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, whether or not originating in their territories… ” So not only Hizbullah but also the Government of Lebanon is apparently to be starved of any new arms supply? So how are the government forces supposed to act effectively in South Lebanon or anywhere else in the coming period?
Israel, of course, is subject to no such arms embargo, even as it proceeds with its evidently very lethal operations inside and against Lebanon…
Again, one good aspect of the resolution is that it does now (clause 18) “[Stress] the importance of, and the need to achieve, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on all its relevant resolutions including its resolutions 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967 and 338 (1973) of 22 October 1973.”
This is a very positive provision to include in the resolution. Not nearly as strong as what I’d advocated for in my CSM column of last Thursday. But it is important that the resolution has given at least some recognition to the fact that the violencebetween Lebanon and Israel is integrally linked to the broader Arab-Israeli peace process.
Let’s hope that future resolutions related to this region go much further in mandating a speedy resolution of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of those wellknown resolutions.

My CSM column on the need for speedy, comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace

The Christian Science Monitor of Thursday carries my column on what to do about Lebanon (also here.) The editors there titled it For a lasting Middle East peace, look back to 1967 UN plan. That’s not quite how I would have titled it, but I guess it’s okay…
In the most operational part of the column I write:

    Israel’s government and people need to find a way other than coercive military force to build a relationship that is sustainable over the long term with these neighbors [i.e., the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples] and thus to enjoy at last the sense of security that they (and all the peoples of the region) so deeply crave. And Americans, who have a long and close relationship with Israel and aspire to have good relations with the Lebanese and Palestinians, should understand that the region’s most urgent needs are to win a complete and fully monitored cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon (and, if possible, between Israel and the militants in Gaza), and to link that cease-fire to an explicit plan to have the United Nations convene an authoritative peace conference within, say, two weeks that aims to find a speedy resolution to all the unresolved strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the draft I sent to my editor there Monday, I had the “plan” part there organized under two separate “bullet points”. But I guess that space considerations prompted her to consolidate the lines of text. So what I would have preferred is this:

    the region’s most urgent needs are:
    * to win a complete and fully monitored cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon (and, if possible, between Israel and the militants in Gaza), and
    * to link that cease-fire to an explicit plan to have the United Nations convene an authoritative peace conference within, say, two weeks that aims to find a speedy resolution to all the unresolved strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Is this pie-in-the-sky? I think not. It strikes me firstly that it would be infinitely preferable to the endless prolongation of the violent conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and the Lebanese, and secondly– as I argue in the column– that nailing down final peace agreements on all three remaining fronts really is quite do-able once you get your head around the possibility.
Think how close the Israelis and Syrians– and therefore also Israel and the Lebanese– came to resolving their conflict back in 1996 or 2000. (You can read my 2000 book about much of that diplomacy, to get all the fascinating details.) Or think how close the Israelis and Palestinians came in late 2000. Nailing down these agreements really is a much closer proposition than it might appear… and nearly everyone realizes what– if they are to be sustainable over the long term– they would look like… That is, very close to a total “land for peace” deal on all fronts. Which, yes, was indeed the content of the security Council’s famous resolution 242 of 1967.
So what I am arguing is Yes, let’s go for the very speedy, very complete ceasefire, as called for in the Siniora plan. But let’s tie that ceasefire not just to a promise to resolve the Lebanon issue– an issue that, quite frankly, is just about impossible to resolve sustainably on its own, given the country’s chronic political fragility… But let’s tie it instead to a firm promise to resolve the Syria-Israel dispute and the Palestine-Israel dispute as well as the Lebanon-Israel dispute. Why not pursue such a bold vision?
What on earth is there to stop all these strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict from being resolved in very short order???
Back in 1991, an earlier round of very committed diplomats and world leaders pledged themselves to just that goal. (And yes, before that, in 1973, as well… though with– on Henry Kissinger’s part– notably less sincerity.) The diplomacy that flowed from the Madrid Peace conference of 1991 did not succeed, it is true, in resolving all outstanding strands of the Arab-Israeli dispute. But it did resolve the Jordanian-Israeli dispute; and, as noted above, the post-Madrid diplomacy laid a considerable amount of the groundwork for a final peace settlement on both the Palestinian and the Syrian fronts, too.
I assure you: If the Syrian-Israeli conflict is resolved and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is resolved, Lebanon will make peace with Israel in a jiffy.
So okay, maybe you have concerns with my approach. You may say, “Wouldn’t it overload the Lebanese ceasefire to have it organically linked (as per my formulation above) to the promise to convene a speedy conference dedicated to negotiating a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace?” Yes, it might– a little. But right now, the ceasefire doesn’t look as though it’s going to be happening terrifically soon, anyway. So as we sit out the agonzing wait for it, why not start planning how it can be tied to an effort to build a really worthwhile regional peace, rather than a Lebanon-only stabilization effort that– especially in the absence of any incentives for the Syrians– is anyway almost certainly doomed to be short-lived?
You may say, “Wouldn’t promising a speedy and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace effort somehow reward the Hizbullah and Hamas militants for their intransigence and use of violence, and reward Syria for having supported them?”
I would say a couple of things to this: First: the real hardliners in Hamas and Hizbullah would certainly not feel “rewarded” by such a peace effort. These are the people who hate the idea of any peace that leaves a thriving Israel in place at all, and would want to fight to the end. But the majority of supporters and fighters within these organizations could be won over to supporting a regional peace effort– provided it were sufficiently balanced to give independent Palestine and independent lebanon a real chance to thrive (alongside the thriving Israel.)
Surely, the idea should be to try to structure the incentives so that as many Palestinians, lebanese, and Syrians as possible want to make peace, rather than to continue to fight??
Secondly, I’d say we have to get completely away from the idea that securing a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace is something that is only in the interests of the Arabs. Of course it is not! It is something that’s in the interests of the vast majority of Israelis, as well. Yes, some proportion of those Israelis who have been living as (illegal) settlers on occupied Arab land, whether in Golan or the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, would have to be prepared to see those homes coming under (or, in the case of Golan, returning to) the soveriengty of an Arab state. The fate of all those settlers would certainly be part of the peace negotiations… But all those issues have already been extensively negotiated before, back in the 1990s… No need to re-invent the wheel there…
Anyway, that’s the big outline of my argument. A few other people– Brent Scowcroft, Jimmy Carter, etc– have already started to argue in the US discourse that this current crisis should prompt the world to renew its search for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. I applaud the boldness of their vision and willingness to speak out and articulate it! I think that what I add to the argument is the idea that the promise of the very rapid convening of the regnional peace conference should be embedded within the ceasefire resolution itself.
Oh, and I also make the point in the column that the US faces quite enough challenges elsewhere in the world right now– including in Iraq and Afghanistan– that surely it should welcome any move that promises the speedy de-escalation of Arab-Israeli tensions… Plus, I draw out an extended comparison of the current crisis, as it faces the US, with the Suez crisis of 1956, as it affected Britain. I don’t recall that either Scowcroft or Jimmy Carter did that…
Anyway, I’m off to California in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. Tell me (courteously, as always!) what you think of the column.