WASHINGTON: After Hezbollah guerillas captured Israeli soldiers on Wednesday, a furious Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz warned that the Israeli army would ‘turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years’. Unfortunately, that statement was truer than he may have intended.
By pounding the Beirut airport and other civilian targets, the Israelis have taken a step back in time — to tactics that have been tried repeatedly in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories without much success. Many Lebanese will be angry at Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah for provoking the crisis, but that won’t translate into new control on the militia’s actions. Instead, the outcome is likely to be similar to what has happened in Gaza over the past several weeks: Israeli attacks to free a captured soldier further weakened the Palestinian Authority.
Watching the events of the past few days, you can’t help but feel that this is the rerun of an old movie — one in which the guerillas end up as the winners. Israel’s fledgling prime minister, Ehud Olmert, wants to emulate the toughness of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. But that shouldn’t include a replay of Sharon’s 1982 Lebanon invasion, a strategic mistake that spawned Hezbollah in the first place.
Hezbollah’s action in seizing the Israeli soldiers was utterly reckless. That’s the new part of this crisis — that Iranian-backed radicals deliberately opened another front in a war that, in their minds, stretches from Gaza to Iraq. Watching Nasrallah’s cocky performance at a news conference on Wednesday, I thought that he seemed almost to be inviting an Israeli counterattack — knowing that it would destabilise the Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora, which is one of the few solid achievements of US policy in the region.
Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That’s the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverising invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt.
The danger of Iranian-backed adventurism is immense right now, but that’s all the more reason for America and Israel to avoid past mistakes in countering it. Reliable strategic lessons are hard to come by in that part of the world.
In responding to the Lebanon crisis, the United States should work closely with its allies at the Group of Eight summit and the United Nations. Iran and its proxies would like nothing more than to isolate America and Israel. They would like nothing less than a strong, international coalition of opposition.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service
