The trouble with opportunities is that it is sometimes wiser not to take them. An inexperienced government in Israel seized the chance to put into operation a long-matured contingency plan to uproot Hezbollah. The one track-minded Bush administration seized the chance to put pressure on Iran by smashing its ally in Lebanon.
At a suitable point, both countries are still reasoning, the resulting mess can be handed over to the international community, which will then further both Israeli and American purposes by disciplining and ultimately disarming Hezbollah. To put it another way, America’s proxy Israel attacks Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and then Europeans and others will be proxies for the United States and Israel in closing Hezbollah down as an armed movement.
Yoram Schweitzer, at the Israeli think-tank the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, put it this way in a recent commentary: “Israel’s objective is to turn tactical setbacks into strategic outcomes whose gains outweigh the losses.” Life is not so simple, certainly in the Middle East. With the fighting not over, the balance of gains and losses cannot yet be fully assessed. But it does not look that promising for Israel or the United States. There are five obvious reasons.
First, casualties in the Israeli armed forces have been high by that country’s standards. Hezbollah casualties have been high, too, the Israelis say, yet the rockets keep coming. Second, there is anger within the international community at being handed this hot potato. Third, Israel loses every day in terms of world public opinion. Fourth, Israel loses even more every day in terms of Middle Eastern public opinion. Governments can sign peace treaties, or adopt “reasonable” policies, but it is peoples who decide whether the treaties, the policies, and sometimes even the governments, will stick. All over the region moderates within the elites face a popular opinion further hardened against Israel. Fifth, by enhancing Hezbollah’s status against that of Al-Qaeda, the Olmert government may have intensified the rivalry between the two, something that could rebound on Israel in the future.
As for the United States, it is in danger of finding itself fighting on both sides in a potential regional confrontation between Sunnis and Shiites, which America may itself have generated by its mismanagement of intervention in Iraq. Fighting with Shiites against Sunni extremists in Iraq; fighting, at one remove, through Israel, against Shiite radicals in the Lebanon. The Iraqi prime minister underlined this in Washington this week when he insisted on voicing his desire for an immediate cease-fire in the Lebanon.
And what, with all these risks taken, lies at the end of the road? A deal which will leave Hezbollah standing, if perhaps chastened and somewhat diminished in its physical resources, and Iran and Syria, perhaps also chastened, but no more than that. It is hard to imagine any conceivable scheme that will lead to the early disarmament of Hezbollah. It is too strong within Lebanon and Iran is too strong within the region. Some commentators maintain that many want to see the back of Hezbollah, and so they do. Even more so the Lebanese, including many Shiites. Yet most understand that it is evolution and negotiation, rather than simple coercion, which will eventually solve the problem. The evolution of a deeper Lebanese identity on the one hand, negotiation with Hezbollah and with Syria and Iran, on the other. Maybe this nasty little war will advance those ends but it is hard at the moment to see how.
Anyone who imagines that French and Spanish soldiers can come in and start stripping Hezbollah of its weapons is a lunatic. President Chirac stressed the other day that there would have to be a political agreement before a multinational force could be deployed. That seems to mean that the problem would have to be solved before the force supposedly created to deal with the problem was actually dispatched.
There is a contradiction here, which needs examination. It is, in part, a consequence of the general impulse to manage crises by internationalizing them. It is also a consequence of the fact that neither Israel nor the United States want to be the enforcers. It certainly has something to do with the perennial French interest in a Lebanon, which Paris somehow still sees as a French ward. It may reflect a European idea that putting significant forces into the region — something which, after all, Israel has always resisted in the past — would make it a more influential player, able, perhaps, to get negotiations moving in a way the United States cannot. A force, in such circumstances, however, would not disarm Hezbollah but seek a way of living with it. Finally the contradiction may arise simply because there is a need to be seen to be doing something, always a dangerous moment in international affairs.
The Israeli strategy would work, perhaps, if Hezbollah was so wrecked that Iran and Syria would have to sue to ensure its bare survival. But that was never likely and looks less so now, so there has to be talks on who gives up what and who gets what in order to stop the violence. The difficulty is that America and Israel, it seems, have nothing to trade when it comes to the point of passing from military action to diplomatic negotiations. They have little to offer — or little that they are ready to offer — to Hezbollah, Syria or Iran.
Some will say that the parties are too opposed to reach anything more than a brief truce, that this has to be a fight to the death. Condoleeza Rice said this week: “It is time to say to those who do not want a new Middle East that we will prevail. They will not.” This is the language of the absolute contest: we win, you lose. Yet most conflicts end, or are contained, because each side gets some, but not all, of what it wants.
Iran and Hezbollah want Israel’s destruction. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was once so dedicated. Hamas is so dedicated and yet has been pragmatically inching toward a different position. Iranians in high positions have occasionally hinted that they might follow where Palestinians themselves were ready to go. But for that there has to be more on the table than Israel’s plan for ruthless unilateral surgery on what remains of Palestine.
Israel’s insistence on being in an unrivalled hegemonic position — the only possessor of nuclear weapons, the only arbiter of the fate of the Palestinians — is equally a problem. The search for absolute security solutions has bedeviled Israel from the beginning, and it is time it was abandoned.
