AFTER ISRAEL FAILED TO DESTROY HEZBALLAH: Dealing Realistically With Hezballah and Iran
by leveymg
Cross-posted at DailyKos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/30/83429/5995Sun Jul 30, 2006 at 05:34:29 AM PDT
Israel has failed in its mission to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. So, what should the United States and Israel do now?
The United States and Israel need to embrace reality, cease operations in Lebanon, and halt the planned war with Iran.
MORE below.
leveymg's diary :: ::
A week ago, a headline in the The Times of London described, "The Race to Destroy Hezbollah Before the World Calls For Peace". That article quoted U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, "What is the point, Washington's UN Ambassador asked bluntly, of negotiating with `a bunch of terrorists'?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...AP reported yesterday, a "deal in works to end crisis." After giving Israel the agreed-to three full weeks to carry out the mutually-planned destruction of Hezbollah, the Bush Administration has finally signaled that it's time for a diplomatic phase of the conflict to begin and the appalling destruction of Lebanon to end.
http://sfgate.com/... While Condi has "no comprehensive plan" for negotiation, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have apparently reached a mutually satisfactory bargaining position.
http://edition.cnn.com/...Lebanon and France have signaled a willingness to perform peacekeeping duties, but French President Jacques Chirac's office said in a statement on Saturday that it would not deploy its troops until a cease-fire has been reached. "The agreement between the sides is a precondition for the entry of a multinational force in south Lebanon," read the statement.
http://www.haaretz.com/... A cease-fire freezes the status quo, and that is not the status quo that Israel and its neocon allies in Washington had anticipated three weeks ago, when the fighting started.
Barring some dramatic reversal of fortune, the end of the war between Israel and Hezbollah appears to be near. Peace threatens to break out, and it likely won't be on the terms that Israel wanted two weeks ago when ABC reported, "Israel aims to destroy Hezbollah"
http://www.abc.net.au/...WHAT DID ISRAEL ORIGINALLY WANT?On July 21, Mathew Kaulman of the San Francisco Chronical published a landmark investigative report into the planning for the Lebanon invasion. That story said:
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified. "The specifics described for that joint U.S-Israeli plan were as follows:
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries.
In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores.
In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis. http://sfgate.com/... *
Thousands of Hezbollah rockets were indeed destroyed, but that occurred as they impacted across northern Israel. The net result, predictably, was not a very large number of Israeli casualties. Almost all of these devices are crude Katyushas, essentially a Russian design from the late 1930s that mates a common artillery round to a big bottle rocket. These things have a range of between four and 17 miles. With no guidance system, they are not missiles in the sense of being modern weapons. To date, the same AP report says that 52 Israelis have been killed, less than half of them civilian. By comparison, AP states that "Lebanese Internal Security Forces said Saturday that 421 people have been killed and 1,661 have been wounded in Lebanon."
It can be noted that prior to three weeks ago, there were no confirmed killings of Israeli civilians during the preceding five years attributed to Hezbollah terrorism or to its rockets.
http://www.adl.org/... That fact may come as a jarring contrast to the misimpression that most Americans have gotten in their mass media of a literal Hezbollah rain of terror from the skies. This was the subject of a rancorous debate here at Dkos yesterday and at DU after the author cross-posted an article on the subject of the apparent lack of Israeli casualties from Hezbollah reported in an Anti-Defamation League report, "Major Terrorist Attacks in Israel". After someone posted an Israeli Government source, it became clear that there had been Israeli military losses in border skirmishes with Hezbollah during the five years before July 2006, but these totalled no more than 25 fatalities.
http://www.dailykos.com/...So, we should ask, if Hezbollah had not been attacking Israeli civilians, and its military losses have totaled less than five deaths a year since it ended its occupation of Lebanon in 2000, what makes Hezbollah and its rockets an "existential threat"? Why is it so important then to the Israels, as ABC reported, to "destroy Hezbollah"?:
The Israeli Government now says its aim in attacking Lebanon is to destroy Hezbollah, as well as secure the release of two of its soldiers captured by the militant group.
Israel's Army has begun a fifth day of attacks on targets in Lebanon, where its offensive has killed about 100 people.
A spokesman for the Army, Captain Yakov Dalal, says only legitimate sites are being targeted to stop Hezbollah from obtaining the missiles it has been firing into Israel.
"We are going to continue until one or two things happen," he said.
"We're trying to put Hezbollah out of business and for good.
"The other thing that could happen is that the Lebanese Government start taking responsibility and that they start bring troops to the south of their country and demilitarise the Hezbollah.
"So at any point the Lebanese Government can intervene and bring an end to this crisis.
"But if they don't we intend to deal with Hezbollah on our own."Well, two weeks later, two things are obvious. The Lebanese government isn't going to be bloodied and bullied into battling with Hezbollah. "Setting Lebanon back fifty years" has, in fact, advanced Hezballah's political standing to hero status, in the eyes of most Lebanese. Unless there is a cease-fire on Hezballah's terms, neither the central government nor France are going to even deploy peacekeepers on the border with Israel. And, second, if Israel can't disarm Hezbollah, much less destroy it, Israel must deal with it through means other than war. The last option is to somehow prod, persuade, or propagandize its big, dumb American cousin into committing American troops to finish the plan.
Somehow, one increasingly doubts that plan is going to succeed. It's been nearly three weeks, Mr. Prime Minister. Now, wrap it up.
CNN 7-29
Deal in works to end crisis
Meanwhile, Hezbollah representatives and Lebanese cabinet ministers have reached an agreement in general -- but with some major reservations -- on a proposal to end the 18-day crisis, Lebanese government officials say.
En route from Asia to the Middle East, Rice told reporters she expected the weekend talks to be intense and emotional because both sides are "under extreme pressure in a difficult set of circumstances."
She said she was not bringing a comprehensive plan to the table.
The Israelis have called for an international force to police a buffer zone just north of the border with Lebanon to ensure that Hezbollah cannot use the southern part of the country to launch rockets.
Israel began its operations against in southern Lebanon on July 12, after the Iranian-backed Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid, killing three soldiers and capturing two others. Five more soldiers were also killed.
Since then, Lebanese Internal Security Forces said Saturday that 421 people have been killed and 1,661 have been wounded in Lebanon.
In Israel, 52 people have been killed, more than half of them soldiers, and more than 1,200 wounded, according to Israeli officials.WHAT CAN NOW BE DONE?The race is now over, Hezbollah has not been destroyed, and that question will have to be answered if Israel is not to fall into another interminable, expensive quagmire in South Lebabon of the kind that it endured from 1982 until it negotiated its last withdrawal in May 2000.
The very first thing that the United States and Israel need to do is acknowledge the status quo ante bellum. The reality that both the Bush and Olmert governments refuse to acknowledge is the fact that after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, Hezbollah had not engaged in any sort of direct terrorist attack on Israeli civilians. Furthermore, its rockets were not once during that time directed at civilians. In addition, Israeli military losses on the Lebanese border, at less less than 25 killed in action, do not support the contention that Hezballah was acting as an existential threat to Israel. Quite the opposite. Hezbollah showed that it could exercise relative constraint and a high degree of internal discipline. Acknowledge that fact.
In effect, Hezballah has been a stabilizing force on Israel's northern border. Israel should acknowledge these facts, and seek in its negotiations a return to that status quo. The United States and Israel, if they want an enduring settlement on realistic terms - something which extremists in their own ranks have prevented have prevented them from doing -- should recognize reality and publicly abandon their previous positions, vis-à-vis:
The United States and Israel consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, claiming that the organization initiates attacks against civilians. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The United States and Israel consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization. http://www.cnn.com/...Further, the Bush-Cheney Administration needs to publicly disavow its ongoing campaign to use the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a springboard toward a wider conflict in the Middle East and direct confrontation with Iran. A DKos diary yesterday contained an important analysis of that developing conflict by Ray Close, a former CIA analyst in the Near East division. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Mr. Close is the author of an important article published on June 10, 2003, "Why the Lies About WMD Matter: A Crime Against American Values",
http://www.counterpunch.org/.... Mr. Close's article appeared almost a month before Ambassador Joseph Wilson came out with his NYT op-ed criticizing the Administration's misrepresentation of the Iraq WMD program. Close offered the following analysis in DKos yesterday about the overall strategic purpose of the Israeli's disproportionate response to Hezbollah's capture of two of its soldiers on July 12:
http://www.dailykos.com/...I am fascinated to hear your opinion that analysts in the Pentagon are such strong advocates of the view that Nasrallah is primarily an agent of the clerics in Teheran, and I am disturbed to learn that this analysis enjoys so much credibility at the senior levels of the USG.
This is, of course, the point of view being pushed so hard by both the Israelis and the neocons in Washington.
I was equally upset to hear this view repeated unanimously (and identically) by a variety of people on national TV yesterday, coming from Senators McCain, Schumer, George Allen and John Warner as well as official spokespersons from State and the NSC. It was as if they were all reading from the same artfully crafted briefing sheet handed to them by some staffer who got it straight from either JINSA or the Washington Institute.
It is a dangerously one-sided point of view that furthers Israel's long-standing objective of luring the US into a violent confrontation with Iran. The ultimate consequence could be that everyone in the USG --- Democrats as well as Republicans --- from the President on down --- will, by such dangerously oversimplified logic and careless rhetoric, accelerate America's momentum toward:
(1) officially defining and treating Hizballah's actions against Israel just as if they were atrocities by international terrorism aimed directly at the people of the United States, and thereby:
(2) making it almost inevitable that both political parties in the US will talk themselves into a "moral" commitment to aggressively confront those who encourage, support and harbor Hizballah terrorists (i.e. Syria and Iran), and thereby:
(3) making impossible the establishment of any constructive dialogue with either Iran or Syria in which other critical issues, such as Iraq and nuclear proliferation, for example, might be dealt with by means short of violence. In other words, this widely-supported urban legend is rapidly becoming another potentially disastrous conflation of biased intelligence analysis, simplistic political bombast and lunatic fringe right-wing Christianity that could drive us toward another major military confrontation --- whether or not that was really our carefully considered and intelligently reasoned objective.
I do not think I am overstating the danger here. Once momentum starts moving in that direction, we might soon find ourselves in another situation where stubborn pride, as much as anything else, would make it hard for us to modify our rhetoric and admit our inability and that of our Israeli allies to disarm and dismantle the military arm of Hizballah. It's a proxy war right now, but if our surrogates (the Israelis) fail to achieve their objectives, they will attempt very purposefully to broaden the conflict into a much larger one directly involving the United States and Iran.
We may be thoughtlessly maneuvering ourselves into another situation in which critical United States national interests are subordinated to the much narrower interests of Israel.
- Ray Close In conclusion, the United States and Israel have already failed in their plan to destroy Hezballah. Regardless of that reality, they are still headed down a path toward a wider conflict with Iran, a plan for political and military escalation which is equally unrealistic and far, far more self-destructive if given the operational go-ahead.
Time to embrace reality, gentlemen. Start negotiating.
**
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