Actually, though, a lot has changed–and not just because Hizbullah had transformed itself from the 1980s terrorist organization that trafficked in hostages and car bombs into a disciplined militia that was able to absorb everything the Israelis threw at it the past three weeks, only to emerge from the rubble and dare it to keep trying.
There is another, even larger reality this time around: today the battle is not just over some hardscrabble hillsides in southern Lebanon, but for public opinion in a far more polarized and interconnected world. In that world, Hizbullah’s patron, Iran, is plotting to develop nuclear weapons. Al Qaeda is trying to turn the conflict to its advantage. At least some Palestinians who began as Hizbullah’s sworn enemies now vow not to make a separate peace in Gaza, leaving Israel with a two-front war. Perhaps most worrisome of all, Iraq’s American-backed government is taking time out from its bitter civil warring to align itself with Hizbullah and make its anger over American support for Israel very clear indeed.
No one denies that Hizbullah started the fight, with its unprovoked incursion into Israel, and no one doubts that Israel can win it, at least in conventional terms. But that’s not what matters as much as public perceptions, and the impact those perceptions have from Tehran to Cairo. The conflagrations in Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq risk converging, if not on the ground, then in that virtual reality–on satellite television and the Web–where Al Qaeda and Hizbullah find recruits for their global networks. Israel can bomb Lebanon’s infrastructure all it wants, but Hizbullah, which operates beyond the limits of a state, ultimately has no infrastructure. Hizbullah’s own rockets and missiles can miss nearly all their targets, with comparatively little loss of life, but so long as they keep firing, they shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility and win friends and admirers in a radicalized Muslim world. “The Zionist enemy has not been able to reach a military victory,” said Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a speech Friday on his organization’s Al-Manar TV, still broadcasting despite Israeli Air Force strikes that obliterated its studios and transmission towers. “I’m not saying that. They said that. The whole world is saying that.”
The potential consequences are sobering to contemplate. Lebanon could descend into yet another civil war, with 750,000 refugees possibly fleeing the Shiite areas of southern Lebanon into other parts of the country–and taking their weapons with them. America could find itself in the middle of a growing civil war in Iraq, facing Shiite foes as well as the Sunni insurgency.
The blowback was worrisome enough that diplomats were scrambling to find a face-saving solution. Moderate Arab allies, who began by condemning Hizbullah for starting the mess, were more worried about the anger on their own streets. That left the United States almost alone, with Britain, in resisting calls to impose an immediate ceasefire. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rushed back to the region over the weekend with a plan for an “urgent” ceasefire combined with a multinational “stabilization force.” Israeli officials backed down from their insistence on a deal that would call for disarming Hizbullah and force it to accept previous U.N. Security Council resolutions recognizing the sovereignty of Lebanon’s weak central government. Instead, the Israelis signaled they would accept a plan where Iran and Syria would be prevented from rearming the group. An Israeli official indicated his government would also discuss an exchange of prisoners and bodies from the recent fighting, another climb-down. But Rice had a difficult job of shuttle diplomacy ahead of her, with Israel insisting on freedom for its captured soldiers, Hizbullah suspicious of any foreign peacekeeping force, and possible contributors to such a force understandably nervous about sending troops to Leb-anon, a graveyard for peacekeepers for four decades.
Compromise had not been on the table when diplomats met in Rome last Wednesday to find a solution to the crisis. Lebanese Prime Minister Fou-ad Siniora pleaded with Rice in public as well as in private: “The country is being cut to pieces,” he said. “We wanted a ceasefire, an immediate ceasefire.” But the conference communiqué insisted that any cessation of hostilities “must be lasting, permanent and sustainable.”
By Friday, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair met George W. Bush in Washington, the United States was softening the terms. “This is a moment of intense conflict in the Middle East,” said Bush. “Yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity and a chance for a broader change in the region.” But the president resolutely held to his view that Lebanon was just the latest front in the war on terror. “What the world is seeing is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope,” the president said. “This should be a moment of clarity for people to see the stakes in the 21st century.”
Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had a twisted take on the same subject. In a slickly produced video released last week, he called for all Muslims to support the fight against Israel. In the past, the group had condemned Shiite Muslims as “worse than the Jews.” From the Bush administration’s vantage point, Hizbullah, like Al Qaeda, is waging an open-ended war–one that is in many ways even more complex than the traditional Arab-Israeli conflict. The essence of the dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis is territory. The essence of that between Hizbullah and Al Qaeda, says Alberto Fernandez, spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, is the hope that they might turn these and other conflicts into dramas about the future of the whole Muslim world. In this light, a battle along the Lebanon-Israeli border could very easily fuel a larger, more amorphous but no less deadly conflict in the same way the Iraq war has.
Underlying the Bush administration’s concern about Lebanon was a realization that Hizbullah could win simply by losing. Already Israel’s incursion has lasted longer than the Yom Kippur War or the Six Day War. Though Israeli officials said publicly that they had expected the stiff resistance Hizbullah guerrillas showed, other Israeli analysts were more skeptical. “It’s not going well,” says historian Tom Segev. “It should never have started.” Bush officials, who earlier had been confident the Iranian-backed militia could be crippled quickly by Israel’s military, were “freaked out” by Hizbullah’s resilience, says one senior U.S. official who didn’t want to be named expressing skepticism about policy. “It is a very, very dangerous situation,” said another, who requested anonymity for the same reason. “The more Hizbullah resists, and the more Israel hits back at them, the more open-ended this is.” In Beirut a member of Hizbullah’s politburo smiled when asked what it would take for Hizbullah to win. “To hang on,” he told NEWSWEEK. “When we can stand in the face of the forces supported by the United States, that is a great victory.”
To the Americans and the Israelis, that may seem like overblown rhetoric. Hizbullah hinted that it would soon start firing missiles that would hit Tel Aviv, but so far its surprise weapons barely reached past Haifa, exploding harmlessly. Still, even that trajectory played well in the region, especially coming off the Arab rage over the growing body count. While Israel suffered 52 dead, mostly soldiers, Israeli strikes killed more than 450 Lebanese, mostly civilians. The United Nations says a third of the Lebanese dead were children.
The Iranians seem to have trained their protégés well. After more than two weeks of fighting, it became clear that Israel was not going to deliver a knockout blow to Hizbullah, and the longer it went on, the more the militants had to gain. “There are some important elements of the administration who still cling to the forlorn hope that Israel can damage Hizbullah much more in the next few days,” says one U.S. official, speaking with anonymity because he was criticizing other officials. By last week, though, that was a minority view. U.S. officials say the Israelis have been stunned to discover the extent to which Hizbullah has dug in, and the sophistication of their communications as well as the camouflage of their installations.
In the bloody fight for the little town of Bint Jbeil, just four kilometers from the Israeli border, the Israelis pulled back after nine of their soldiers were killed. “The Israelis thought the area was empty, but the resistance was sitting back,” Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, a member of Hizbullah’s politburo, told NEWSWEEK. “They were very surprised.” And while Israel said it had accomplished its objectives in Bint Jbeil, Hizbullah quickly claimed a victory. In Cairo, posters went up in celebration of the “victory,” reading nasser, 1956; nasrallah, 2006.
Meanwhile, Hizbullah was gaining allies with each passing day. Fighting first broke out in Gaza in June, with the capture of an Israeli soldier, and it continued there last week; in a single day Israeli forces killed 24 Palestinians. But some in the militant Hamas organization, no friend of Hizbullah’s in the past, made it clear there would be no separate talks. “Nobody wants to negotiate without Hizbullah,” says Mahmoud Musleh, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Parliament. “To do it in isolation would be a betrayal.” That’s a far cry from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Shiites cheered the Israeli Defense Forces for attacking the Palestinians. Now Hamas supporters in Gaza sing a popular song, “Right on, Hizbullah!”
The Iranians, while careful not to focus too much attention on themselves, clearly are pleased with the way these forces that they finance, arm and train are performing. “Hizbullah doesn’t have a borderline to defend or to withdraw from; Hizbullah is a guerrilla group, and guerrillas do not have borders,” said former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “Guerrillas will let their opponents make a move and then attack them from back, front and sides.”
Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman said last week that the Israeli military is “sensitive” about targeting. “Believe me, we have the capability, both militarily and technologically, to erase the whole of Lebanon and to make sure that nobody can live there another day,” he told the press in New York. “This is not our intention. And because we are doing it so carefully it is taking longer and we are suffering more casualties.” But pictures of even a few children torn apart by Israeli bombs have a devastating effect on international opinion. “There is something fundamentally wrong with the war where there are more dead children than armed men,” said U.N. Special Coordinator Jan Egeland.
Some of Hizbullah’s biggest supporters are America’s allies in Iraq’s Shiite-led government. Already, radical Shiites in Iraq are angry at the U.S. military as it tries to suppress death-squad attacks against the Sunni minority there. Last week Bush announced that an additional 5,000 U.S. troops will likely be brought in to bolster the 133,000 American soldiers already there, mostly to deal with sectarianism in Baghdad. When Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited Washington last week, some members of Congress criticized his failure to condemn Hizbullah. But at home in Baghdad, Sheik Aws Khafaji, a radical Shiite cleric, demanded to know why Maliki had dined with “the occupiers.” All the terror wreaked on the Shiites in Iraq by car bombs and terrorism, he said, was “under the protection of Zionist-American plans.” So far, that’s empty talk–but the U.S. military has tangled with Shiite militias in Iraq before, and a resumption of that is a nightmare scenario for troops that are already hard-pressed to deal with the Sunni insurgency.
For many Israelis, what sets this war apart from their last one in Lebanon is the sudden, terrifying sense that it is no longer about borders but about existence. “The message that will be conveyed to the Arab and Muslim world will be quite simply that fanaticism pays,” says Dror Etkes, an activist with Peace Now. “We cannot be seen as the losing side,” says historian Amatzia Baram. “The Islamic world is [1.2] billion people. Israel is 6 million … If we stop right now, it means we lost.”
Something less than victory for Israel, and something less than defeat for Hizbullah, may be the only formula that can bring the fighting to a stop. Near Avivim, on the Israeli border with Lebanon, 36-year-old Staff Sgt. Roni Omessi watched as his artillery battery hurled 155mm howitzer shells into the Lebanese hills. He had been there in 1990, too, when Israel still occupied southern Lebanon. “I feel sad for them,” he said. “For them and for us.”
Wars end in the Middle East. That’s happened many times. This time the challenge will not only be to bring this one to an end, but to keep it from changing into something still worse–in the region, and beyond.
