Dickey Endless Mideast War

Hizbullah said it wanted just this kind of fight. Yes, it could lob missiles into Israel, but it couldn’t wage the kind of “heroic” battles its would-be martyrs crave if Israel responded only with “bombs from remote areas in the sky,” Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah complained last Sunday, so “any land advancement will be good news for the resistance.”

In fact, the original strategies of both sides have failed. And while there may be many more “surprises,” as Nasrallah likes to keep saying, Israel and Hizbullah are falling back into old, familiar, deadly and destructive patterns with no clear end in sight.

What did Nasrallah want? Aided by Iran and abetted by Syria, he has become the leading exponent of a pan-Islamic militancy that is not so much about land as about the ideas and causes that move the Muslim masses, especially hatred of Israel. When Nasrallah ordered the capture of two Israeli soldiers last week, his strategic goal was to seize the issue of Palestinian liberation for himself and his sponsors.

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Back in 2004, Nasrallah got 400 Lebanese prisoners from Israel in exchange for one Israeli businessman he’d taken hostage. Now there are only about nine Lebanese left in Israeli jails, according to human-rights groups. Did Nasrallah think that winning their freedom was worth the risk of this war? No.

But there are 10,000 Palestinians being held by Israel. Just about every Palestinian family has someone or knows someone in prison, and nobody has been able to get the Israelis to let them go. Soft-spoken Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas pleaded for the release of these men, women and children. But Israel ignored him—and that’s one reason Hamas was elected to rule the Palestinian territories. Of course, Hamas had even less of a chance to free the detainees through negotiations.

Enter Nasrallah. He has worked closely with the leadership of Hamas’s guerrilla wing , and, at a minimum, he inspired its decision to kidnap an Israeli soldier just outside the Gaza fence on June 25. Then, as ferocious Israeli retaliation rained down on Gaza, Nasrallah made his own move. He claimed Hizbullah’s July 12 operation to capture Israeli soldiers was launched to help defend “our brothers in Palestine who are being murdered daily.”

“What happened in Lebanon today might open a way out of the crisis in Gaza,” Nasrallah proclaimed the night his war began. “In other words, the Israelis are saying we don’t want to negotiate with Hamas … We say: All right. Israel usually negotiates with us. At first they say no, but then they accept.”

Then Nasrallah made his gambit perfectly clear. “We don’t object to a joint Lebanese-Palestinian effort in this connection to emerge from this crisis” to end the “barbaric detention of 10,000 prisoners in Israeli prisons.”

Nasrallah miscalculated badly, and not only for himself. Amid the death and destruction wrought by the new Lebanon war, the continued suffering of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza has been all but forgotten; the issue of Palestinian prisoners has dropped off the map and Israeli ground forces almost certainly will take new Lebanese captives in the current fighting.

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Worse, from a Palestinian point of view, the short-range Qassam rockets launched from Gaza and Katyushas launched from Lebanon bolster the arguments of Israelis who want to build walls and establish buffer zones taking away more and more of the Palestinians’ already meager territories. Israelis can now argue, quite rightly, that Qassams in Qalqilya would reach Tel Aviv; Katyushas in Bethlehem would hit Jerusalem.

No, Nasrallah’s “Operation True Promise” has accomplished nothing good for the Palestinians, and it’s done a lot to destroy the few chances left for a just peace in the future.

But the Israelis aren’t fighting the war they planned either. When they launched their retaliatory “Operation Change of Direction,” bombing and rebombing Beirut airport, blasting scores of bridges, blockading ports, obliterating factories and warehouses, they made only the thinnest pretense that these targets were related directly to Hizbullah’s activities. Instead, Israeli spokesmen put a humanitarian gloss on the murder and mayhem wrought by their air power. They were tearing Lebanon to pieces in order to save it from the tyranny of Hassan Nasrallah, they said, and they’d learned the technique from the Americans.

“May I remind you,” Israeli war-cabinet member Isaac Herzog told the BBC this week, “that NATO has carried out many operations of this nature exactly in the former Yugoslavia and where it had to end the role of some of the worst people who governed that place. Well that is exactly what we are doing to Hizbullah.”

This might seem an arcane comparison, especially to the many people who only dimly remember that the Kosovo war ever happened. But it’s intriguing, because it reflects a dangerous tendency among the commanders of high-tech military machines to think fights waged entirely from the air can solve lots of problems on the ground.

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NATO’s 1999 campaign against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was the apotheosis of stand-off warfare: 78 days of bombing, 38,000 sorties, a completely one-sided airborne apocalypse meant to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Yet thanks to precision-guided munitions, the civilian death count was held to about 500, even as the attacks devastated the economic and industrial infrastructure of rump-state Yugoslavia. The Kosovars were saved, Milosevic soon fell—and not a single American soldier died.

You can see why Israeli commanders might want to emulate the model. “The analogy is as close as historical analogies get,” historian Martin Van Creveld of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University told me over the phone. “I can think of no campaign that is closer.”

But from a strategic point of view, there is at least one enormous difference. The NATO campaign depended, ultimately, on the capitulation of one man. “Milosevic was in control of Serbia, and he could stop the fighting when he wanted,” said Van Creveld. But Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is powerless. Nasrallah started this war, not him, and Siniora can’t stop it. Milosevic, moreover, was a cynical politician who wanted to survive. Nasrallah is a religious demagogue who exalts a cult of martyrdom. Milosevic was the president of a state, and his great ambitions were based on a primitive, narrow nationalism. Nasrallah is at once a militia leader and a would-be leader of global Islamic radicalism. The fate of the Lebanese state is, in many ways, irrelevant to him.

Where will the fighting go from here? Van Creveld is not one to suspend judgment. (You may remember an essay he wrote last November about Iraq that concluded: “For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, [U.S. President George W.] Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men.”) But this morning when I called Van Creveld back to talk about the meaning of the Israeli moves on the ground, he was cautious. He noted that Hizbullah rocket attacks have slacked off dramatically since the Israeli ground offensive began.

“We don’t know if this is permanent, temporary, how far into Lebanon it will go,” he said. It’s also not clear whether it will lead to a long-term occupation, which the Israeli government would like to avoid. “It may create a situation where the whole southern part of Lebanon will be turned into a dusty strip where no one can go,” he said, a free-fire zone where more than 500,000 people once lived.

If that seems to work to protect Israel from Katyushas, we might expect similar zones to be created in the West Bank and Gaza—indeed, the process is already under way. Yes, the Kosovo model for quasi-humanitarian war has failed, but a new model of ever-expanding no-man’s lands may well be taking shape for the future.

In the Middle East, the best-laid plans are most often for endless war.