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Asia Times:
The war Hezbollah is really fighting

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Jul 25, 2006

The asymmetrical warfare between a US-backed regional superpower and an Islamist resistance movement ill-equipped to reciprocate in kind the deadly, punishing blows by its adversary is now entering its second week with no sign of abating.

Both militarily, politically and diplomatically, both sides in this "widening war" have mirror-imaged each other by targeting cities and towns and villages rather indiscriminately, even though the death and destruction wrought by Israel's state-of-the-art weaponry dwarfs by a vast margin the damages exacted by Hezbollah's rather primitive rockets.

Irrespective, Hezbollah can boast about both its steadfastness in the face of relentless bombardment reminiscent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombardment of Serbia in the summer 1999. It can also take heart from its unprecedented ability to shower northern Israel with rocket attacks, bringing normal life for a full one third of the state of Israel to a virtual standstill.

The key question is, of course, how long Hezbollah can withstand the Israeli air and (increasingly) ground onslaught without running out of ammunition, logistic support and sheer will power. A war of attrition, when Israel's arsenal is fully and quickly replenished by the US, according to press reports, while Hezbollah's supply routes are choked off, is not in Hezbollah's strategic interests.

But, that may be inevitable since Israel has publicly devoted itself to dismantling Hezbollah's military infrastructure "once and for all" and, yet, the air campaign will in all likelihood fall dreadfully short of this objective. Crippling Hezbollah, albeit temporarily, may be the maximum achievable by the Israeli air campaign.

Israel's incremental ground invasion
As of this writing, Israel's army has penetrated some three miles inside Lebanon, capturing some villages, while massing troops at the border in anticipation of a potential full-scale invasion. This has the dual objective of eliminating Hezbollah's strongholds near the border and creating a "deep buffer".

Mindful of history, when Hezbollah's guerrillas waged an ultimately successful counter-strategy that forced Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel is fully aware of the "war trap" and is seeking a working formula whereby it can accomplish its ultimate war objectives short of re-occupying parts of Lebanon.

The war's pattern of escalation may, on the other hand, create its own momentum toward large-scale invasion, in which case, all roads will lead to Beirut. This is the main reason that Hezbollah's hot pursuit by Israeli forces will culminate in urban warfare in Beirut's vicinity and, indeed, the entire length of the capital city presently under siege.

Thus, Israel's military conundrum: settling fpr less than full victory against the determined Hezbollah will scar Israel's military prestige and, yet, the price of total victory may prove too high, in terms of destruction of Lebanon and the level of tolerance of international public opinion. Worse, there is no guarantee that Israel's quest for total destruction of Hezbollah will succeed. In fact, Beirut may prove to be the Arabs' Stalingrad, delivering a stunning blow to the invading Israeli army at the end of a bloody campaign.

With the war beginning to galvanize the Arab street, a protracted conflict will bring al-Qaeda to Lebanon in hordes, thus exponentially widening the net of Arab terrorism. A timely unifying development potentially putting to the backburner the present Sunni-Shi'ite schism turning violent in Iraq and Pakistan, the war in Lebanon is also proving a critical antidote to Lebanese factionalism, in light of the announcement by various Lebanese leaders that Lebanon will stand united against an Israeli invasion.

Western military analysts have readily dismissed the Lebanese Army as "no match" for Israel, which is true, but the 60,000 standing army can quickly double in size through a general mobilization, as well as by accepting recruits from other Arab and Muslim nations.

Besides, Lebanon's premier has already alluded to turning his army into a guerrilla-type army, which has the advantage of familiarity with the terrain, fighting a war of independence and self-determination against what is perceived as a ruthless enemy which has not spared even Beirut's hospitals. Lebanon may be physically devastated now, but politically it has demonstrated an admirable new maturity bound to be praised by future historians.

The war on the diplomatic front
"There is no diplomacy," decried the Lebanon's man at the UN after a week of bloodshed passively observed by the United Nations, despite a formal complaint lodged by Lebanon at the Security Council.

Ignoring repeated pleas by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for an immediate ceasefire, backed by certain European governments, such as France and practically the entire bloc of developing nations known as the Non-Aligned Movement, the US has singlehandedly brought the Security Council to a state of paralysis. The feeble argument of its envoy John Bolton is that we "must wait and see what the military outcome will be" and that to do otherwise is "putting the cart before the horse".

This even though the UN Charter and the council's mandate is to prevent armed conflicts and to institute peace in inter-state conflicts. Such mockery of the UN's role simply adds another fresh log to the burning furnace of anti-Americanism running rampant in the Middle East and, indeed, the entire Muslim World.

The US's justification that "Israel has the right to defend herself" is not once extended to the oppressed Palestinian people, who have been enduring the most horrific series of air and ground assaults. According to the Palestinian envoy to the UN, who reported to the Security Council on Friday, Israel has conducted over 100 air strikes and shelled Gaza more than 1,100 times.

The US Congress has self-limited itself to uncritical support for Israel, passing a resolution condemning Syria and Iran, without even bothering with the previous niceties of keeping a facade of fairness.

A new resolution by the House of Representative calls for the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers, without mentioning the fact, cited by the London Observer, that a day prior to the kidnapping of a soldier by Hamas, Israeli commandos violated Gaza's territorial sovereignty by "abducting" two Hamas members. In fairness, respected US lawmakers should similarly ask for Israel's release of detained Arabs.

Few US politicians dare to criticize Israel's destruction of much of the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, imprisonment of dozens of Palestinian lawmakers and half its cabinet ministers.

A just reaction by Congress would be to openly entertain reprisals against Israel if it refused to halt its deadly campaign. A range of options must be explored: reducing military exchanges, freezing the delivery of weapons purchased by Israel and scaling down military-to-military cooperation.

Also, Washington can threaten to withdraw economic assistance, delay investments, freeze preferential trade agreements and dissolve joint economic projects, and, in the worst-case scenario, freeze economic assets.

Short of the US heavily weighing in on Israel, the threat of escalation potentially harming the US's strategic interests in the region for a long time looms on the horizon.

As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice begins her journey to "the region", which reportedly does not include any Arab capital, in spite of Syria's declared willingness to engage in dialogue with the US, it is abundantly clear that this is mainly diplomatic window dressing for Israel's war efforts.

Rice's bravado about a "new Middle East" is vacuous, in light of the Bush administration's lop-sided pro-Israel stance and the previous absence of any initiative whatsoever toward resolving the Palestinian "issue". And, if the US and Israel are warming to the notion of an international buffer force at the Israel-Lebanese border, it is less because of the US's concern for peace and more due to the failure of Israel to break the back of Lebanon and its fears of a war trap mentioned above.

Hezbollah's option: Unilateral ceasefire
Hezbollah is the sole Arab entity that has delivered a stunning blow to Israel by forcing it to depart from Lebanon after 18 years of combat, one main reason for its immense popularity in Lebanon and the wider region.

Far from a "terror group pure and simple" as repeatedly labeled by US government leaders, Hezbollah is a well-entrenched politico-military movement participating in the national life of Lebanon while, simultaneously, acting as a welfare arm of the Lebanese system by providing basic welfare services to its largely underclass mass constituency.

Clearly, Hezbollah is not a foreign army, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, that would be forced to flee the country. Rather, it is a home-grown phenomenon deeply immersed in the fabric of Lebanese society and its collective identity.

As a result, both the US and Israeli policy of destroying Hezbollah is doomed to failure, and no matter how severely it is pounded by massive bombs, it will survive and its phoenix will rise from the ashes of Lebanon.

At the same time, that is not to say that Hezbollah is beyond critical reproach. For one thing, by targeting civilians in Israel, Hezbollah has put itself on the same (im)moral equation as the state of Israel presently terrorizing the entire Lebanese nation. But, a more prudent strategy by Hezbollah may be to unilaterally declare a ceasefire and avoid any more rocket attacks on northern Israel, focusing on the Israeli ground forces making incursions into Lebanon.

There are multiple advantages to such an initiative by Hezbollah. First, Islam forbids the harming of civilian populations and Hezbollah would thus temper its fierce resistance with a moral high ground.

Second, Israel would be hard-pressed by the international community to continue with its aerial assault on Lebanon in the aftermath of Hezbollah's unilateral ceasefire, and the more Israel sustains this the more isolated it will find itself internationally, given the tide of world opinion already horrified by the colossal damages to Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon.

With the facade of any "symmetry" between Israel's air campaign and Hezbollah's rocket attacks, which the pro-Israel US media has been aptly exploiting, thus disappearing, Israel may win the war militarily, but will sure lose it politically and diplomatically.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review. He is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction .

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG25Ak02.html

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Hezbollah banks on home-ground advantage

By Sami Moubayed
Jul 26, 2006

DAMASCUS - After two weeks, neither Hezbollah nor Israel has been able to achieve its objectives. Israel entered the current war to crush Hezbollah. To date, it has lost 37 of its citizens in battle, including 18 soldiers and an air force officer killed on Friday when two helicopters collided.

Bombs have landed on the Israel cities of Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, Safad and Nazareth. Hezbollah, on Day 14, to Israel's dismay, is as strong as it was on Day 1. Hezbollah has not been destroyed, disarmed or pushed back into the Lebanese heartland.

A review of the Israeli press shows that many observers, analysts and Israeli officials are no longer calling for the complete and immediate disarming of Hezbollah - realizing that this is very difficult, but saying that this military operation aimed at degrading, rather than crushing, the Lebanese resistance group.

On the other side, more than 377 Lebanese have been killed - many in their homes. The Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails have not been released, and Lebanon has been savaged by ongoing Israeli air raids since July 12.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Beirut on Monday in an attempt to find a political solution to the crisis. There is already talk in Beirut about a solution put forward by Saudi Arabia, which calls for a complete ceasefire and prisoner exchange between Hezbollah and Israel. It demands "a firm solution" to the occupied Sheba Farms, and Hezbollah's withdrawal into the Lebanese heartland, away from the border with Israel, and adds that disarming the Shi'ite group will not be discussed "at this stage".

Rice's diplomacy, however, perhaps supported by the Saudi plan, comes as "too little, to late". The Americans are uninterested in a ceasefire and this has been publicly repeated by President George W Bush. They waited for two weeks to intervene, hoping that in the meantime Israel would be able to destroy Lebanon, and get the Lebanese to turn against Hezbollah.

Bush does not see the new conflict as another Arab-Israeli war, but rather as an Israeli-Islamic/jihadi war, similar to his own adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-03. Bush appears to believe that because Hezbollah calls for jihad, it is no different from al-Qaeda.

In fact Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly criticized al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, but the US president refuses to listen. The Americans, very easily, have demonized Nasrallah, portraying him as right up there with bin Laden and the now-slain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

This has not been too difficult for the US media, since Nasrallah does look and talk like a jihadi. He is bearded, turbaned and armed, speaks military Islam and is backed by Iran. Completely misinformed at how popular Nasrallah and Hezbollah are in Lebanon, the Americans felt that if it did not attempt to censure Israel over the bombing of Lebanon, the Lebanese would rise against Hezbollah, the way they did against the Syrians in February-March 2005.

Realizing now how foolish such an assumption really was, the Bush team dispatched Rice to Beirut to meet with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and discuss more realistic approaches to the crisis. Rice told the premier, "Thank you for your courage and steadfastness." This single remark was enough to add more fire to the anti-Americanism boiling in Lebanon.

What steadfastness was Rice talking about? It was rather ironic for Rice to thank Siniora for showing steadfastness against an assault that she had condoned and tolerated for two weeks. And Siniora's cabinet is held together by a coalition that includes Hezbollah and members of the military. Further, a number of Hezbollah members are deputies in the Lebanese parliament.

Nabih Berri, the Shi'ite Speaker of parliament who is closely allied with Nasrallah, and with whom Rice met in Beirut, has said that any prisoner exchange by Hezbollah will be administered by the Lebanese government - Siniora's cabinet. Meaning, Hezbollah captures and fights and the cabinet negotiates a prisoner swap on its behalf.

Yet Rice insisted on acting as if Hezbollah were an illegal movement that did not officially exist in Lebanon, ignoring that in Siniora's cabinet agenda he echoes what Hezbollah says - such as demanding the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and the return of the Sheba Farms occupied by Israel.

Rice should understand that any public patronization of Nasrallah, or verbal assault on him by Siniora, would bring down the Lebanese government. A comedy show mocking Nasrallah on Lebanese TV this summer nearly caused a Shi'ite revolution in Beirut.

Nobody can come out and call Nasrallah a terrorist in Lebanon - even if Rice and Bush ordered them to do so - at least, not when he is fighting a war against Israel. By insisting on such an attitude, Rice demonstrates just how misinformed she is on Middle East affairs. She conditioned that Hezbollah retreat 20 kilometers from the border with Israel, saying that there would be no ceasefire unless Hezbollah released the two Israeli soldiers captured on July 12 - something that Nasrallah has repeatedly refused to do.

First a ceasefire, he says, and then a prisoner exchange - not release - where he expects Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to release Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails in return for the two abducted soldiers.

Over the weekend, Major-General Beni Gantz, the commander of ground forces in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said his troops had won control of the village of Maroun al-Ras in south Lebanon. That is, the ground offensive into Lebanon was under way, and with Maroun al-Ras under Israeli control, the IDF now can monitor - and bomb - Hezbollah command posts in the south.

Nasrallah played down the capture in an interview with the Beirut daily newspaper Al-Safir, saying that the Israelis were acting as if by taking Maroun al-Ras they had conquered Stalingrad (in reference to the occupation of the Russian city - then as now called Volgograd - during the Russian Civil War in 1919).

Military command's Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, however, along with Olmert, is still afraid to launch a full ground invasion into Lebanon, although Israeli jets have dropped leaflets into south Lebanon warning civilian residents to evacuate, an act that was seen as solid preparation for a ground invasion.

The Israelis claim that they do not intend to secure permanent positions in Lebanon, just swift operations to search for arms and Hezbollah fighters. Some Israelis, however, fear that the fall of Maroun al-Ras is just a trick by Nasrallah to build up Israeli confidence so that the IDF launches a ground invasion of Lebanon.

Once this happened, Hezbollah guerrillas would be ready to fight them on their own territory. Hezbollah wants Israel to attack by ground - that is now certain. A ground battle with Hezbollah in Hezbollah's court - the south of Lebanon - would spell, if nothing else, huge losses for the IDF.

The IDF announced that it was undecided on whether it wanted to pursue that kind of warfare, as Syrian Information Minister Muhsen Bilal announced that if the IDF entered Lebanon, Syria would be drawn into war with Lebanon. He said that if Israel entered Lebanon "they can get to within 20km of Damascus". He asked: "What will we do? Stand by with our arms folded? Absolutely not. With any doubt Syria will intervene in the conflict."
Also threatening to intervene if ground warfare breaks out is the Lebanese army. Defense Minister Elias al-Murr said this clearly over the weekend, "Our constitutional duty is to defend Lebanon as a Lebanese Army. This is our role."

The IDF has gotten accustomed to combating Palestinian militants in Gaza who carry nothing but Kalashnikovs and who are poorly equipped and poorly trained in guerrilla warfare. This is what the IDF expected when its units crossed the border into Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli troops found men who were armed to the teeth waiting for them.

Hezbollah has anywhere from 2,000-5,000 highly trained soldiers who have mortars, artillery, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. They have been doing nothing but training for combat since 2000. Many do not have another life - they live to fight the Israelis.

Nasrallah learned from the mistakes of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon in 1982. At the time, the late Yasser Arafat was obsessed with the symbols of the "state" he had created for himself and his Fatah guerrillas in Lebanon. The country was riddled with PLO military bases, training camps and political offices, guarded by tanks and armed men and identified by pictures of Arafat and the Palestinian flag fluttering in the breeze.

It was not difficult for the Israelis to find these PLO bases and hit them with rockets, one by one, during its war on Lebanon to drive out the PLO. Arafat killed the essence of a guerrilla movement by making it so visible to the Israelis.

Guerrilla warfare, by definition, operates with small, mobile and flexible combat groups that do not wear uniforms and can blend with society, hide in forests, mountains and bunkers, and avoid being spotted as "the enemy target". They do not have a front line. Today, one cannot find similar Hezbollah military bases and training camps in Lebanon. As a Western observer put it, when walking through south Lebanon, one can feel Hezbollah but one cannot see Hezbollah. There are no military bases or training camps with signs saying that this building belongs to Hezbollah.

Israel must by now realize that Hezbollah is not the PLO. While the PLO were all Palestinian, Hezbollah fighters are Lebanese. The PLO was a foreign group that could be driven out by force from Lebanon. Hezbollah is a Lebanese group, recognized with deputies in parliament and ministers in the cabinet.

It runs schools, hospitals and charity organizations, and millions of Shi'ites rely on welfare, jobs or services administered by Hezbollah. Thousands of widows, orphans, the elderly and the handicapped in the Shi'ite community receive monthly stipends from Nasrallah's group, which represents the Shi'ites who make up 40% of the country's 3.7 million.

Politically they are currently allied to General Michel Aoun, the non-sectarian yet Christian heavyweight of Lebanese politics who has stood by his Shi'ite allies during their latest confrontation with Israel. Aoun's alliance has prevented the Christian street from turning against Hezbollah. The Israelis wanted everybody in Lebanon, the Christians included, to suffer great loss in human life and property so that they would come out and blame Nasrallah for their misery.

Because of Aoun that has not happened. Rather, the Christians are offering shelter to the Shi'ites whose homes have been destroyed, and Christian charity organizations, as well as churches and monasteries, are doing their share of humanitarian work to decrease the suffering of the Shi'ites.

When Israeli bombs start landing in Christian Lebanon, the Christians did not blame Hezbollah. If this was a war on Hezbollah, they reasoned, then why were they being attacked? Attacking them meant that this was a war on Lebanon - all of Lebanon, not only the Shi'ites and Hezbollah.

The PLO didn't have this backing in Christian Lebanon. This made it easy for Israel in 1982 to rally several Christian leaders, such as president-elect Bashir Gemayel, in favor of an Israeli invasion that would expel the PLO. For all of these reasons, Hezbollah today simply cannot be driven out of Lebanon.

One solution would be to incorporate Hezbollah into the Lebanese army once this war is over. This would mean that a political Hezbollah would still exist, but its military branch would come under the authority of the very weak Lebanese army. In other words, the Lebanese army would get incorporated into Hezbollah.

Memories of the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 are still strong in Israel. That war cost Israel an estimated 675 soldiers because it was a fierce ground offensive. Many still say that it was a high price paid by the Israelis - supposedly to destroy Arafat and the PLO. Israelis died, but Arafat was not killed. He just sailed to another destination in Tunis, heading back to Palestine in the 1990s as president of the Palestinian Authority.

The ground invasion temporarily disabled Arafat and the PLO, but it did not destroy them. To date, Israel has fought this new war almost exclusively through air strikes on Lebanon. When its troops did cross the border to single out Hezbollah cells, they were ambushed, driven back or killed by Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah uses its firing bases as bait to the IDF. It fires, awaits an elite unit of the IDF to come in, then ambushes it.

To root out Hezbollah, the IDF will have to invade. Yet if it does, Israel cannot guarantee victory, and if more soldiers are killed in ground combat, the Olmert cabinet might very well be voted out of office by an angry Israeli street.

Olmert wants to clear a 1.5km zone in south Lebanon from Hezbollah. To do that, it needs to station troops a long way into Lebanese territory, up to the Litani River that is 20km in the Lebanese heartland. It has already called an additional 5,000 troops to the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah would also suffer casualties from an Israeli invasion and hand-to-hand combat - no doubt about that - but it can retreat to the "hit-and-run" tactic, using the rocky mountains, the forests and the underground where it is firmly stationed.

Brigadier-General Ido Nehushtan, the Israeli military's planning and policy chief, said Israel had no choice but to confront the threat posed by Hezbollah, pointing out, "We want to change the situation along the border, a situation that we find to be impossible. Our ground forces are prepared and ready for whatever orders are given."

Giora Eiland, however, the former head of Israel's National Security Council, shed doubt on the effectiveness of a ground invasion, saying, "The price of such a move will be high, its effectiveness much lower."

To date, Nasrallah is insisting that Hezbollah has not been severely weakened by the raids, as Israeli military officials are saying. When speaking to Al-Jazeera, Nasrallah said, "I can confirm at this moment - this is not an exaggeration and not part of psychological warfare, but facts - that the command structure of Hezbollah has not been harmed. The entire command structure of Hezbollah, including the political, jihadi, executive and social - so far, the Zionists have not managed to kill any Hezbollah leader at any level."

Nasrallah's deputy, Naim Qassim, appeared on Al-Manar TV hours after Nasrallah gave his interview to Al-Jazeera, showing the world that Hezbollah's political leadership was not harmed by Israel's attack with 23 tons of explosives on the Burj al-Barajneh district of a suburb in Beirut.

To the Arab audiences who are cheering for Nasrallah, the man has a reputation of being true to his word. Unlike most Arab leaders, who lie and conceal the truth from their citizens - in both war and peace - because it reflects corruption and lack of action, Nasrallah has a reputation for honesty.

The Arab masses believe that if Nasrallah says Hezbollah's command structure has not been harmed, then this means - without a shadow of a doubt - that Hezbollah's command structure has not been harmed. Nobody questions Nasrallah.

Israeli General Dan Halutz snapped back, saying, "Hezbollah is not revealing the real extent of its casualties." He claimed that 13 of Nasrallah's men were killed last Thursday by the IDF.

Nasrallah says that since the war started on July 12, only eight of his men have been killed. He added, "I would like to tell you and tell the viewers that when a martyr falls, we inform his family and we then announce this. We do not hide our martyrs until the end of the battle. We have never done this. On the contrary, we always take pride in our martyrs."

Inasmuch as Olmert wants the Lebanese to believe him and his generals, lose faith in Nasrallah and start seeing him as a man who is leading them to disaster, the Lebanese - and the Shi'ite fighters - continue to believe Nasrallah.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst. He is the author of Steel & Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press 2005).

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG26Ak01.html

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The spirit of resistance

By Pepe Escobar

As southern Lebanon is turned into a wasteland mirroring the Gaza gulag, Washington neo-cons may stridently celebrate the contours of a final solution for the Hamas-Hezbollah "problem". Or should they?

Israel's feverish military machine at least conveys the impression it knows exactly what it's doing - with its made-in-the-USA bombs destroying not just military but civilian targets. But this does not mean Israel is winning its war against Hezbollah.

What Israel wants
In March, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised that he would officially announce Israel's "new" and in theory "final" borders before 2010. Olmert has committed his government to finish the wall separating Israel from Palestine. Israel will then retreat inside its wall. There was never any intent by Olmert to deal with the duly elected government of Palestine led by Hamas.

As far as Lebanon is concerned, Israel wants nothing less than a permanent buffer zone on its northern flank. And if Lebanon turns into an Iraq, even better - although the Lebanese have learned the hard way about sectarianism and won't "Iraqify" their own country. Beirut will be rebuilt - again, and again the Hariri clan (with its dodgy deals with the US and the Saudis) will plunge Lebanon in further debt purgatory with regard to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as the clan did in the previous reconstruction process.

There's also the all-important matter of the waters of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. Israel might as well prepare the terrain now for the eventual annexation of the Litani.

Beyond Lebanon, Israel is mostly interested also in Syria. The motive: the all-important pipeline route from Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Haifa. Enter Israel as a major player in Pipelineistan.
So Israel wants to grab water (and territory) from Palestine, water (and territory) from Lebanon and oil from Iraq. This all has to do with the inevitable - the 21st-century energy wars.

This is how we do it
Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, says that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared". Since 2000, in fact, when Hezbollah forced Israel out of occupied southern Lebanon.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, already in 2005 the Israelis circulated a "Three Week War" plan - as it unfolds now, almost to the letter - around selected Washington think-tanks and Bush administration officials. The plan was disclosed by an anonymous Israeli army officer equipped with a PowerPoint presentation.

In this war plan, the first week would be dedicated to destroy Hezbollah's long-range missiles, bomb its command-and-control centers, and bomb transportation and communication routes. That has already happened, at least in theory; but although southern Lebanon has been turned into a new Grozny, Hezbollah seems never to extinguish its stockpile of 12,000 rockets.

The second week would concentrate on attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers and weapons caches. Instead, we have seen the continuation of non-stop, indiscriminate attacks. Ground forces would enter the war in the third week - that's where we are now - but only to attack targets discovered during reconnaissance missions (these are ongoing). This plan did not call for a ground invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon. There's not much to occupy anyway - it's all been turned to rubble.

Only the foolish or the misinformed may doubt that this war is also a Pentagon war. As their mutual interest is obvious - Hezbollah must be destroyed - the only detail to be established is who wagged the other's tail first. According to the US-Israel axis' plan, cutting off Hezbollah from Lebanese society would lead to a vulnerable Syria extricating itself from a close relationship with Iran. That's pure wishful thinking, because what Syria wants back is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights - and that's anathema for Olmert and the Likudniks.

A Vietcong master class
Some, but still only a few, Israelis - sometimes in the columns of the daily newspaper Ha'aretz - are beginning to notice that this carnage will lead nowhere. There are no more than 5,000 Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Hezbollah the political party - heavily involved in health, education and social services - is what really matters for Lebanese. It's absurd to pretend to destroy a movement with such popular support as Hezbollah. Secular democrats may not empathize with the movement, but any serious Middle East observer cannot question its legitimacy.

It's as if the Israeli military machine were betting on the elimination of the Shi'ites from Lebanon (they're the majority of the population already) without facing any consequences. Israelis have reasons to believe it's doable. The mainstream US and European media work as nothing but press offices of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

A ceasefire remains "premature" (the whole world is for it, except the US, Britain and Israel). The House of Saud - supported by the US-Israel axis - has de facto encouraged a Sunni-Shi'ite war in the wider Middle East (that fear of the Shi'ite crescent again). It may take time, but the Arab street - and radical Islam - will renew efforts to try to hang the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait from lampposts sooner rather than later. Fawaz Trabulsi, a professor at the American University in Beirut, said, "Now you risk producing something worse than Hezbollah, maybe al-Qaeda No 2."

Meanwhile, Hezbollah's asymmetrical war effort is absorbing everything thrown at it. Resistance is fueled by a mix of beggar's banquet anger, creative military solutions and Shi'ite martyr spirit. Hezbollah fighters are using olive-green uniforms to confuse the Israelis. According to Jane's Weekly, Hezbollah has done a perfect Vietcong - its fighters operating in a network of underground reinforced bunkers and command posts near the Lebanese-Israeli border almost unassailable by Israel Defense Force bombs.

The practical result is that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is ever more popular all over the Arab street. Kind of like the new, 21st-century Saladin. Hezbollah's moral and political cache could not but rise among peoples and movements worldwide who keep being bombed to oblivion but never had a chance to bomb back.

For Hezbollah - as well as for Hamas - "winning" means not being disarmed and/or exterminated, the avowed goal of the State of Israel. Apart from Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Hezbollah may have also learned a lesson or two from the battlefields of Chechnya - as it configures itself, like the Chechens, as one of the only guerrilla groups in the world capable of facing an extremely powerful state army.

In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was forced to issue a fatwa denouncing the Israeli assault. This means that Sistani knows very well Iraqi Shi'ites may be on the verge of turning all their anger against - who else - the occupying Anglo-American axis.

The fatwa may not be enough to appease them. Israel's rampage has even unified Baghdad's parliament; Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds took a unanimous vote condemning Israel and calling for a ceasefire. Fiery nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, whose rising influence rivals Sistani's in US President George W Bush's "democratic" Iraq, hinted what may happen when he said at his Friday sermon in Kufa, "I will continue defending my Shi'ite and Sunni brothers, and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons."

As if the few thousand Sunni Arab guerrillas bogging down the mightiest army in history were not enough, Muqtada's Mehdi Army has all the potential to make life even more hellish for the Americans in Iraq.

The asymmetricals never sleep
So this is the way the "war on terror" ends - not with a single bang but with the multi-sonic bangs of asymmetrical actors getting re-energized in their fight against the US-Israel axis. The Israeli army could not put down a Shi'ite guerrilla outfit in southern Lebanon - nor a bunch of stone-throwing Palestinian kids, for that matter. The US Army could not cope with a bunch of scruffy Sunni Arabs armed with fake Kalashnikovs. Sunnis or Shi'ites, stateless or in failed states, freedom fighters or "terrorists", they simply will not go away.

Pursuing their own logic, equally impatient Washington neo-cons and Israeli Likudniks would cherish nothing better than the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and then in Syria and Iran.

What happened in Iraq, and is still happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon, spells that the world will have to get used to a new reality. But against this, the asymmetricals will not only be lurking in the shadows; they will retaliate.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG26Ak02.html

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Overreaching in Lebanon

By Emanuel Shahaf

After two weeks of fighting, Israel is beginning to overreach. The decision to "ask" the population of south Lebanon, between the border to Israel and the Litani River, to leave the area (we are talking about close to half a million people), was made to prevent civilian casualties when Hezbollah strongholds in that zone are attacked by Israel. But this puts that population between a rock and a hard place and is disproportionate.

Hezbollah is still the major actor in south Lebanon and naturally will try to prevent this mass exodus. The fact that Israel has taken out the bridges to the north (to interrupt Hezbollah's supply routes) sets the stage for another humanitarian disaster, second in the area only to what is going on in the Gaza Strip, which, lest anybody forget, is still under heavy Israeli military pressure with no end in sight.

Israel's concession to lift the embargo on Lebanon locally to open a corridor to admit humanitarian aid (and let foreigners leave) appears more of a gesture to the international community than a genuine solution to an evolving calamity.

While on the face of it Israel still has the support of the Group of Eight, splits are showing between the US and Britain, which are in no hurry, on one side and the Europeans, who want to finish this mess now, on the other.

Whereas there is no real international pressure yet to wind this campaign down, common sense should tell Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the long-term damage of pursuing this path will likely far outweigh any operational advantages achieved by having a free rein in south Lebanon.

Unfortunately, it appears that Israel's government is still operating under the premise that this campaign's outcome will only be determined by force. The population of Lebanon is still vacillating between its hate for Israel, which is bombing a country that just recently had returned to fragile stability, and enmity for Hezbollah, a state-within-the-state which, manipulated by Iran and supported by Syria, that initiated the attack against Israel with no regard for the possible consequences.

Driving out the population of south Lebanon will only help unite the people of Lebanon in their hate against Israel and coalesce widespread Arab and Muslim support for Shi'ite Hezbollah, and could destabilize local Sunni regimes.

Accompanying the decision to force the local Lebanese population north, Israel's ground operations in Lebanon are expanding rapidly, despite the disastrous experience Israel had there in the past. The military is quick to clarify that ground operations will be limited in scope to prevent getting bogged down in the Lebanese morass, but insists that the operational objectives cannot be attained by bombardments from the air alone.

At the same time, Israel's chief of staff reiterated his view that the war would have to continue for a lengthy period, and in general the government of Israel did not appear to feel any urgency in bringing this campaign to an end before a tangible achievement of some sort had been clocked up.

Having set the aims of this operation sky-high may yet come to haunt Olmert. While Israel's desire to make up for policy failures of previous governments that saw no need to insist on Lebanon's implementation of United Nations Resolution 1559 (getting Hezbollah out of south Lebanon) and to compensate for operational failures of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is understandable, a reality fix should dampen it, preferably quickly.

This campaign will not be resolved by military means but through negotiations. No matter how much force Israel will apply, Hezbollah is likely to launch missiles until the very last day of the engagement and will probably come out of this battle damaged but not defeated, with its head high and quite likely more support in the Arab world for its unyielding attitude toward Israel than before this all started.

And this not because the Arab world subscribes to its ideology or thinks that Hezbollah is a great movement, but because it battled against Israel, caused Israel visible pain and damage, and lived to fight another day.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who is interested in Hezbollah's survival as a fighting force, has sent a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It could be an opening for Germany to get seriously involved in mediation efforts in Lebanon. Germany has excellent relations with Israel, traditional ties and a cultural bond with Iran, and a solid track record of confidential diplomacy mediating between Israel and Hezbollah.

No matter which way this will go, Israel won't easily be let off the Lebanese hook, and Iran or its proxy, Hezbollah, will want to score with the Palestinians as well and try to draw their prisoners in Israel into the bargain. While not only the Israeli government will want to prevent increasing Iranian involvement, it fills a vacuum caused by the departure of Syria from Lebanon (enforced by the international community) and its exclusion from the diplomatic discourse in the area.

The fact that Iran is about to negotiate with the West over the future of its nuclear program may come in handy when push comes to shove, but it may make any agreement in the Middle East more costly for Israel than it remotely imagined.

When this war is over and done, the citizens of Israel may want to ask their leaders whether their achievements are in any relation to damages incurred and, more important, whether there weren't any diplomatic alternatives that could and should have been pursued before hitting back with full force, justified as that may be.

Emanuel Shahaf is a retired Israeli diplomat who served in Southeast Asia between 2000 and 2003 and who works as a business consultant.

(Copyright 2006 Emanuel Shahaf.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG26Ak03.html