What Does Not Kill Me...
...only makes me stronger, and since the likelihood of Hizbollah being wiped out by the weekend looks remote then this is the situation that Israel and the US may have to face.
Far from being annihilated by the continued offensive, yesterday Hizbollah fired 230 rockets into Israeli territory, though causing relatively little damage or loss of life.
This is the ultimate, then, in asymmetric warfare - the deaths of 19 Israelis so far has brought the deaths of 900 Lebanese. Perhaps 3,000 are injured and hundreds of thousands are on the move. There is no symmetry in that at all.
What next? Asia Times' reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad, who claims to be the first into the Baalbek area (which is next on the Israeli target list), managed to speak to a Hizbollah fighter who indicated that there could be grave strategic implications to the current round of fighting:
Further Israeli attacks in the Baalbek area, though, throw the shadow of war directly over Syria. Baalbek and the Eastern Mountains are the main supply lines of the Lebanese resistance from Syria, which would be very concerned about the Israeli military operating just across its border.
Similarly, this area is a virtual outpost of the Iranian revolution. Each and every village square and the walls are decorated with portraits or posters of Iranian revolutionary leaders. All major hospitals, shopping malls and education centers are named after Iranian clerics and leaders and run by Hezbollah.
Thus the next few days will be crucial, as the Baalbek area is not only the strategic capital of Hezbollah, it is also a strategic back yard of Syria and Iran.
The Economist would appear to agree. It is now reporting that this 'Sixth War' (the embryonic conflict has yet to attain a recognizable name), far from breaking the grip opf Hizbollah is the best thing that's happened to Islamist extremism since 9/11:
Increasingly, this conflict has come to be seen by the combatants as one of survival. For Hizbullah, the aim is not just to bloody the nose of a more powerful adversary but to thwart the perceived evil intention of Israel’s staunchest backer, the United States, to dominate the region.
This notion of a wider dimension has taken hold around the region. To many it is a proxy war between Hizbullah’s main sponsor, Iran, and America. But it may also herald the re-emergence, after a decades-long trend among Israel’s neighbours to accommodate the Jewish state, of a broad rejectionist front, this time inspired by pan-Islamist feeling rather than the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
So far, so bad then. Not only this war it making heroes of Hizbollah, not only is it dragging down the international image of the US, UK and Israel axis of denial, but it is even diminishing the status of the friendly Muslim states:
“May God inflict on the children of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia what He has inflicted on the children of Lebanon,” said a placard brandished by a protester in Beirut, pointing to America’s closest Arab allies as complicit, by virtue of silence and inaction, in Israel’s crime.
So the King of Jordan, for example, has had to step off the fence and condemn the war. As ever a voice of reason, he recognises that it has weakened his own moderate stance and further reinforced the extremists. President Mubarak of Egypt now faces daily demonstrations that threaten to reduce his own legitimacy and will have to act too.
Should either of these leaders fall Shah-of-Iran style, unlikely as it is, then we truly will be up to our necks in it. And it does look like times running out for Lebanon's elected and moderate leader too:
Lebanon’s shaky coalition government, hamstrung by sectarianism, has been weakened by its physical impotence in the face of Israel’s onslaught and by its failure to win diplomatic support for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire. Many think the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, brave and capable but doomed by too close an association with the West. Even if Hizbullah emerges militarily weaker, it may become more popular and more extreme, empowering those who now condemn Mr Siniora and his allies as traitors.
Only a year ago, after the assasination of his predecessor and the ejection of Syria from Lebanese affairs, Siniora was the great hope for democracy in the Middle East. Now look at him. What happened to the ideal that democracies don't go to war with each other - since this is looking more like a war on Lebanon rather than a war on Hizbollah?
The saddest thing is that, just like the Iraq war, it was so predictable. You don't need a doctorate in strategic studies to understand that bombarding a light guerilla movement like Hizbollah with conventional force is going to be ineffective. It was blatently obvious that the civilian population was not going to turn against them, as was hoped, but would turn against Israel and their own government - and would gain the support of Islamists across the world.
Yet Olmert, Bush and Blair could not be persuaded - even though they'd seen exactly the same thing happen in Iraq. All three need now to be removed before this current crisis expands to swallow us all.
Economist report below.
A surge of anger
The longer the war goes on, the stronger the Islamists and those who reject peace with Israel are becoming across the region
THE al-Jazeera satellite channel, prime viewing for millions of Arabs, labels this the Sixth War, after the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. On the ground it still looks smaller than those earlier conflicts. It pits Israel, the perpetual protagonist, not against massed armour and multiple countries but against a single force which, though seasoned, spirited and armed with rockets, numbers only a few thousand men.
Yet this war has produced a potential for change that is at least as great as those other wars. Increasingly, this conflict has come to be seen by the combatants as one of survival. For Hizbullah, the aim is not just to bloody the nose of a more powerful adversary but to thwart the perceived evil intention of Israel’s staunchest backer, the United States, to dominate the region.
This notion of a wider dimension has taken hold around the region. To many it is a proxy war between Hizbullah’s main sponsor, Iran, and America. But it may also herald the re-emergence, after a decades-long trend among Israel’s neighbours to accommodate the Jewish state, of a broad rejectionist front, this time inspired by pan-Islamist feeling rather than the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Anger has risen steadily across the region as the blood flows. This week, in the wake of the slaughter at Qana, it surged to new heights. But Israel, this time, is not the only target of fury. “May God inflict on the children of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia what He has inflicted on the children of Lebanon,” said a placard brandished by a protester in Beirut, pointing to America’s closest Arab allies as complicit, by virtue of silence and inaction, in Israel’s crime.
“People [across the region] see Hassan Nasrallah as the leader they’ve been waiting for for five decades,” says Marwan Kabalan, a Syrian academic, of Hizbullah’s turbaned and telegenic chief. With American policy now “in tatters,” he—like many other observers—foresees American influence in the region being rolled right back. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, who now faces daily demonstrations calling for Mr Nasrallah to “destroy Tel Aviv”, speaks of the imminent collapse of any vestige of a peace process.
In Iraq, too, pro-American politicians give warning that, as Lebanon’s Shias suffer, their Iraqi brethren may well join Sunnis in a full-scale uprising. Even in stridently Sunni Saudi Arabia, conservative clerics who denounced Hizbullah as an Iranian tool have faced a furious backlash of calls for Muslim unity in jihad.
In Lebanon itself, the large, pro-Western liberal elite is palpably at a loss. Many have left the country, their hopes shattered after being raised by the drama of a year in which a movement with broad support across the many religious groups had united behind calls for peaceful change, and ended years of domination by neighbouring Syria.
Before the war, Hizbullah had been increasingly isolated in its insistence on maintaining its bellicosity to Israel. With most Lebanese, including many Shias, just beginning to taste the fruits of reconstruction, and with a record summer tourist season in prospect, the Islamists were widely regarded as a dangerous anomaly.
Now criticising Hizbullah in public has become a taboo. Commentators concur that, in the short run at least, Israel’s attempt to blame Mr Nasrallah for Lebanon’s destruction has backfired. Instead, Israel’s bombing of bridges, factories and traffic far from the front is seen as indiscriminate revenge. Israeli strikes against the Lebanese army, which represents all sects and has not joined the fighting, are felt as a national humiliation.
Lebanon’s shaky coalition government, hamstrung by sectarianism, has been weakened by its physical impotence in the face of Israel’s onslaught and by its failure to win diplomatic support for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire. Many think the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, brave and capable but doomed by too close an association with the West. Even if Hizbullah emerges militarily weaker, it may become more popular and more extreme, empowering those who now condemn Mr Siniora and his allies as traitors.
