The Lebanese government is too weak, and the national army too dependent on Shi’a rank-and-file (especially in the South), to weather a showdown with Hizbullah. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora gave graphic evidence of this following the Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in the southern town of Qana on 30 July, by rejecting ‘any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional cease-fire’ ahead of a planned visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, prompting her to cancel it. Even if deployed, the international force would not be able to intervene to assist disarmament of Hizbullah without risking a breakdown of government and army. Siniora and the March 14 bloc, which the US seeks to bolster, will emerge somewhat stronger, but the ramshackle nature of their coalition and tough domestic challenges facing them mean they cannot be free of the need to placate Hizbullah (or Speaker Berri). Hizbullah will see some reduction in influence but otherwise retain key political assets and sufficient military capability in one form or another to protect them, while claiming credit for bringing about a diplomatic process leading to resolution of the Shaba’a Farms dispute.
Israeli deterrence revisited
All this suggests that Israel will achieve the principal aims for which it went to war, namely the return of its abducted soldiers and dismantling or distancing of Hizbullah’s rocket arsenal; the deployment of a large international force (10,000–30,000 strong) in South Lebanon will be a bonus. However, these gains will not come about on terms originally set. They will form part of a package that also addresses Hizbullah’s key demands, depriving Israel of the bargaining chips it has long held on to for leverage in the event of negotiations with Syria over the Golan Heights. Nor can Israel exclude Hizbullah from the diplomatic process leading up to a ceasefire, as it has sought, since the movement is a key player in formulating the Lebanese position.
Israel will acquire gains well worth the price. This is true in relation to Hizbullah’s military posture and offensive capability in Lebanon, but not to restoring the power of Israeli deterrence generally, which was the primary consideration shaping its reaction. The speed and severity of Israel’s actions, and its willingness to use what the UN and EU condemned as disproportionate force, will not be lost on Hizbullah or anyone else. Yet it has obviously failed to coerce Hizbullah unilaterally to cease fire, abandon its principal objectives or submit unconditionally to Israel’s demands.
Israel’s campaign has been hobbled by serious flaws. Not least of these was the flurry of initial statements from senior government officials variously setting the complete disarmament of Hizbullah as a prior condition for a ceasefire and its total destruction as a strategic aim. Besides raising the ante for Hizbullah, this was something that Israel patently could not achieve through military means alone, unless it was willing to envisage invading Lebanon as far as Beirut, as it did in 1982 to eradicate a threat from the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Hizbullah Secretary-General Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah astutely picked on this to tell his followers that the movement would achieve a significant victory merely by surviving. Similarly, dramatic rhetoric describing Hizbullah as an ‘existential threat’ was not only exaggerated but also counter-productive for Israeli deterrence, since it sent the message that a few hundred guerrillas with rocket artillery technology could threaten its very existence.
The mismatch of political aims and military means at the strategic level has been paralleled at the operational level. Reluctance to commit the ground forces needed to combat a dispersed guerrilla force deploying light infantry weapons and mobile rocket launchers has greatly limited the IDF’s effectiveness. Air power has proved of very limited usefulness as a substitute: the Israeli Air Force ran out of genuine military targets within days, and the joint assessment of the Mossad and Israeli Military Intelligence nearly three weeks and 4,000 air sorties into the campaign was that Hizbullah’s command and control capability and willingness and ability to continue fighting for several more weeks have not been seriously impaired. And although the IDF has talked up successes for the benefit of Israeli opinion, more significant for Arab audiences has been the difficulties it encountered in the few places where it went in on the ground: having announced the seizure of the border town of Bint Jbeil, which it described as Hizbullah’s ‘terror capital’ in South Lebanon, the IDF pulled back after heavy losses. No less remarkable, again from an Arab perspective, has been the flight of around 30% of its northern population and the extensive economic cost to Israel.
Olmert’s need for a political strategy
The IDF command, having long advocated action against Hizbullah’s rockets, may persuade the government to allow significant ground operations in Lebanon in the coming fortnight. But the damage to Israeli deterrence is unlikely to be undone, all the less if military escalation fails to coerce Hizbullah into submission or bring about a fundamental change in the parameters of an eventual diplomatic solution. The problem has not been one of political constraints imposed by the government, but the latter’s lack of a political strategy. In hindsight, this was demonstrated by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s decision, within only a few hours of the abduction, to eschew diplomacy and authorise the IDF to launch the detailed plans already prepared for taking the offensive to Hizbullah, without formulating an integrated political-military approach.
Yet Olmert can pluck a significant gain from the conflict if it results in a stable political agreement on the Lebanese front. But then the question arises: if Israel was willing to reach a deal addressing Hizbullah’s demands, albeit under certain conditions, then was the military campaign, and its associated human and material cost, necessary? More pertinently, such an outcome might deepen the conviction of the Palestinians, especially Hamas, that a military option, however modest, is indispensable to persuade Israel to negotiate a political solution to their conflict.
Israel will be hard put to resist a shift in its approach towards both Syria and the Palestinians, if a diplomatic solution to the Lebanese crisis proves effective. Here the problem is that Olmert, who did not once mention Lebanon or the Hizbullah threat in a major policy speech until the start of the present crisis, does not have much more of a strategy. Syria, whose President Bashar Assad is more immediately concerned with avoiding the international inquiry into the Hariri assassination than with regaining the Golan Heights, may not demand attention in the short-term. But where the Palestinians are concerned, Olmert has little more than a vague ‘convergence plan’ and will be hard put to build sufficient domestic support for Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank, let alone resumption of a formal peace process with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. Yet this is the more urgent challenge.
Regional implications
Resolution of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict has already been identified by Washington and London as essential to stabilising the Israeli–Lebanese front. This is welcome to key Arab governments, notably in Saudi Arabia and Egypt but also in Jordan and Iraq, which have been severely discomfited by their need to maintain good relations with Washington while seeking to limit the impact on their public opinion of Lebanon’s subjection to Israeli military might with open US support. The real risk to these Arab governments, as they see it, is that the conflict in Lebanon will radicalise their own Islamic militants and provide them with an important rallying cry and means of increasing recruitment. The governments find themselves in a bind: they cannot be seen to endorse US policy, with its open support for Israel’s offensive and present diffidence towards an immediate ceasefire at the UN Security Council, but fear the example that Hizbullah will set if it can claim victory.
Yet the Lebanese crisis is already playing regionally into Sunni-Shi’a sectarian rivalry, as well as fuelling anti-US sentiment, which poses a particular threat to domestic stability in Iraq, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, along with Syria. The recent call to jihad against Israel by al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri shows how Sunni-Shi’a rivalry may translate into intensified competition to confront the US and its allies. The US and others can do much to forestall this trend, especially by following through on pledges to find genuine political solutions to the Lebanese and Palestinian conflicts.
