And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (15 page)

The international outcry prompted Israel on July 31 to suspend
airstrikes over southern Lebanon for forty-eight hours. Pressure was building for a permanent cease-fire and an end to the hostilities.

While the airstrikes were suspended, Israel sent thousands more troops into southern Lebanon to recapture the so-called security belt it had occupied between 1982 and 2000; this buffer, which reached several miles into Lebanese territory, was designed to create some space between Israeli civilians and militant groups north of the border.

By August 5, the IDF had ten thousand soldiers operating inside Lebanon, but they were mostly reservists who were under-trained, having spent the past few years on police duty in the West Bank and Gaza. They were poorly equipped and often lacked water, food, and ammunition. This was a far cry from the seemingly invincible IDF that had cowed Arabs in the past. Even so, the IDF announced on August 7 that it had completed plans for a full-scale ground invasion.

At the same time, the UN was feverishly working on the framework for a cease-fire. On August 11, Olmert reviewed the draft of the UN plan, which called for an international force of fifteen thousand peacekeepers to be deployed along the border and for an arms embargo to be imposed in order to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring more weapons. Significantly, however, the cease-fire was not conditioned upon the return of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, whose kidnapping had triggered the bloody conflict. The agreement was accepted by Hezbollah and the Lebanese government on August 12 and by the Israeli government on August 13.

By then, Olmert had launched the ground invasion, a last gasp to assert military superiority on the ground. Once again, the IDF got its nose bloodied by Hezbollah guerrillas. Two dozen tanks were sent to join paratroopers supposedly holding the high
ground at a village called Ghandoriyah. The column ran smack into a Hezbollah tank trap and came under a barrage of Russian-made Kornet antitank missiles. The paratroopers, meanwhile, were getting an awful surprise of their own. They suddenly found themselves pinned down by Hezbollah fighters who had been lying low, waiting for an opportune moment to strike.

By the time the misbegotten incursion ended, twelve Israeli soldiers had been killed and fifty wounded. Eleven of Israel’s supposedly indestructible Merkava Mark IV tanks had been hit. All told, thirty-three Israeli soldiers died in the war’s last sixty hours, one-fourth of the IDF’s fatalities in the conflict. At least five hundred Hezbollah militants were killed.

Critics would say Israel did itself no honor in another attempt to get in last licks before the cease-fire took effect at 8:00 a.m. on August 14, 2006. Both sides fired cluster bombs, but Israel was by far the greatest offender, showering Lebanon with nearly 4.2 million submunitions in the last seventy-two hours of the war, more than 90 percent of the total it fired during the whole thirty-four-day conflict. Some of the bomblets were newly manufactured, others were US munitions dating to the Vietnam War. Driving around south Lebanon after the cease-fire, I saw unexploded cluster bombs and other ordnance almost everywhere I looked.

The Lebanon war had been a debacle for the Israelis. The vaunted IDF destroyed towns but did not manage to actually
capture
one. It was even worse from a public-relations standpoint. For decades, Israel had claimed the moral high ground over its Arab enemies, taking pride in its “purity of arms.”

In most countries, the performance of Israel’s military would have been a disgrace, but in Israel it became a doctrine, named after the Hezbollah stronghold that was flattened in south Beirut.
As articulated by Israeli general Gadi Eizenkot, the Dahiya Doctrine pertains to asymmetric warfare in an urban setting, in which the army targets civilian infrastructure to prevent the enemy from using it for military purposes. That’s military-speak and doesn’t reflect what Israel did in Lebanon in 2006. The object of the Dahiya Doctrine was to hit the enemy, and the civilians living nearby, so hard that the enemy dare not try to hit back, at least for some time. The idea is if you can’t beat your enemy in urban battles, inflict so much suffering on the civilian population of the city, or the country, that the people turn on the enemy and demand that it not attack again.

The Dahiya Doctrine recalled the bombing of civilians in World War II to try to break the enemy’s morale, a strategy whose efficacy is still debated. But when Israelis are asked how they can justify destroying more than a quarter of Lebanon—125,000 houses and apartments, 91 bridges, highways, and roads the length and breadth of the country—they have a ready answer: after 2006, Israel enjoyed years of peace and quiet from its northern neighbor. The doctrine of pain seemed to have bought peace for Israel, at least in the short term.

A big question is what will happen to the Dahiya Doctrine when Israel meets a foe that can match its military technology at least in terms of inflicting an equal or greater number of civilian deaths and infrastructure damage on the Israeli side.

For me, the Lebanon war was a milestone. It was a war that ended without even an attempt to resolve the core grievances. It was a war designed to be painful to dissuade a hostile group, in this case Hezbollah, from attacking again. It assumed that when conflicts are complicated—and hostilities ingrained—that they can only be resolved by the fear of more pain and death. It assumes a perpetual state of unresolvable hostilities in the Middle East.

I TURNED THIRTY-THREE SHORTLY AFTER
I began settling down in Beirut after the month-long Lebanon war. I was fulfilling my ambition, covering the biggest story of my generation, and I was being rewarded with praise and promotions from my bosses at NBC. But I sure wasn’t living a normal life.

For years I had frenetically covered the fighting in Iraq, spending six or eight weeks in the war zone, then pulling out for a couple of weeks of R & R at a hotel in Thailand or Italy, then returning to the nerve-jangling violence of Baghdad. Then when I finally got the go-ahead to set up a bureau in Beirut—which I thought would
bring a modicum of stability to my life—the Israelis and Hezbollah started killing each other.

The shooting finally stopped on August 14, 2006, and I found the apartment of my dreams in Beirut on a small, historic street near the Albergo Hotel. Ironically the apartment had been vacated by an Italian diplomat during the fighting. Israel was bombing Hezbollah strongholds in south Beirut both from the air and from the sea and at times the fighting was getting close to the center of the city.

So now I had a place to call home. I started dating again and had a lively social life, unremarkable for a single guy my age unless you’re a single guy who had spent the past few years putting your mattress against hotel windows as a defense against car bombs.

I had a broader journalistic portfolio now, but Iraq was still at the center of the action. The triumphant US invasion had become a sectarian struggle that was far more savage and sinister and seemed to go on forever. To understand why, you have to go back to the debate over the American invasion. President Bush seemed obsessed with Iraq. He believed that if the United States got rid of Saddam Hussein and instituted democratic reforms, the Middle East—and the world—would be a safer and better place. He seemed to have no idea, however, how it would happen. The administration often used the analogy of planting the “seeds of democracy” in the Middle East, as if they’d sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn’t sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn’t enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many “seeds of terror” and “seeds of hope”), democracy is more like a fragile flower that
requires constant attention and the right soil. Dictatorships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own.

The casus belli, of course, was Iraq’s purported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A secondary rationale was an alleged link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” Bush said on October 7, 2002, five months before the invasion.

I thought this was preposterous, as did most people familiar with the Middle East, but the supposed presence of WMDs made it a secondary concern. Saddam sometimes pretended he was a true-blue Muslim by commissioning a copy of the Koran purportedly written with twenty-eight liters of his own blood. In 2001, he burnished his Islamic-warrior image with the completion of the Mother of All Battles mosque in western Baghdad. It had minarets shaped like Scud missiles.

But Saddam was no Islamist and saw Islam mostly as a propaganda tool. He drank whiskey. He smoked cigars. He liked nice suits. He did not dream about the seventh century. He lived very much in the twenty-first century. A brutal dictator, he did not tolerate dissent, much less a bunch of extremists who wanted to topple him and restore the caliphate. Al-Qaeda was his enemy, not his friend.

Another factor in the decision to invade Iraq was that the war in Afghanistan, which began less than a month after 9/11, had been too easy. To use a phrase military leaders love, the US “overlearned” the lesson of Afghanistan. In just three months after 9/11, at a cost of only a billion dollars and one American life, US airstrikes, 110 CIA operatives, and 300 Special Forces scored a decisive victory. Working in concert with Afghan tribesmen,
who were paid according to the amount of lethal force they used against the enemy, the United States toppled the Taliban and prompted a hasty retreat by al-Qaeda, which at the time only had several hundred fighters. The small American force in Afghanistan would likely have captured Osama bin Laden after the battle at Tora Bora in December 2001, but the Defense Department, pointing to its early success, rejected the request for eight hundred additional soldiers to chase down al-Qaeda in the rough mountainous terrain.

If those eight hundred troops had been sent in and bin Laden was captured or killed back in 2001, it is possible the United States would never have invaded Iraq. Perhaps the defense establishment, the Iraq war lobby, and the neocons around the president would have been satisfied that Washington got its revenge after 9/11 and had something to show for it, bin Laden’s head. Instead, toppling the Taliban and sending al-Qaeda into hiding was a quick, mostly covert, and cheap affair. Washington had little to point to and tell the American people that 9/11 had been avenged. Ousting the Taliban should have been the end of the Global War on Terrorism, known by the ugly acronym GWOT, but the United States couldn’t walk away from the blackjack table. Aside from Bush’s personal, family preoccupation with Iraq, the generals at the Pentagon hadn’t got their piece of the action. Afghanistan, at least at first, had been so easy and quick, many assumed Iraq would be just as simple, with far greater rewards. Iraq would be a
real
war, with troops in uniform, where officers could win medals and command men in battle, far different from the CIA-led mission that tossed out the Taliban in the blink of an eye. Even though the Iraq war would prove to be a failure, its proponents were right about a few things. How many generals did the American public
know before 9/11? After the war, how many became presidential advisors, special envoys, lobbyists, consultants for arms manufacturers, and analysts for oil companies and hedge funds? So the United States went into Iraq, expanded its military operation in Afghanistan, rotated 2 million troops through the war zones, left seven thousand Americans dead, fifty-two thousand wounded, a million US veterans filing for some form of disability, caused the deaths of two hundred thousand Muslims—perhaps many more, depending on the estimate—spent a few trillion dollars, and created some choice real estate for hyperviolent extremists.

When the inspectors could not find WMDs, Iraq’s alleged ties with al-Qaeda took on greater importance as a justification for military action. Then the American proconsul, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, dissolved the Iraqi army and gave Shiites control of the country for the first time in fourteen centuries, stripping the minority Sunnis of their self-respect, stoking their sectarian rage, and sending them into the arms of Sunni extremists.

Al-Qaeda flocked to Iraq like moths to a flame, making the claims of the Bush administration a self-fulfilling prophecy. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a protégé of bin Laden’s, turned Iraq into a sectarian killing field.

I watched all this unfold while covering the aftermath of the invasion. The Sunni-Shiite civil war ushered in a level of brutality that was unrivaled even in a region known for bloody excess. To the dismay of al-Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Zarqawi made Shiites the primary enemy, not Americans. And he understood how to use the Internet to spread the pornography of violence, digitally recruiting young Sunni men with visions of martyrdom and the solace of dark-eyed virgins in the
afterlife.

Bin Laden never did this because he had neither the means nor the inclination. Bin Laden mostly released audio messages and the occasional low-quality video. But the United States had helpfully wired Iraq so everyone could use a cell phone—and, as an unintended consequence, get access to Zarqawi’s gruesome videos. Which is why, in the historical accounting, Zarqawi and not bin Laden may be viewed as the transformative figure in Islamist terrorism. An American airstrike killed him in 2006, but he had by then created the template for ISIS. ISIS evolved over time, first as al-Qaeda in Iraq and then striking out on its own.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION KEPT CLAIMING
that the war in Iraq was making American cities and towns safer. Fighting terrorism became the main rationale for the war after WMDs weren’t found and the “seeds of democracy” didn’t seem to be sprouting. I can’t remember how many times I heard the president, US diplomats in Baghdad, and American troops quote the phrase: “fight them [the terrorists] over there [in Iraq], so we won’t have to fight them over here [in the United States].” It became almost a religious mantra, defense by constant offense. Kill the monsters in their lair before they could come to the United States and kill us. US troops were told they were in Iraq to keep the terrorists from blowing up shopping malls back home and therefore saw most Iraqis as potential enemies, which complicated the fact that they were also told to build communities and win hearts and minds. In reality, by occupying Iraq for years and by reopening old religious wounds and upsetting the old order, the US invasion was making a terrorist attack in the United States more likely than it would have been otherwise. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and wasn’t
a nest full of terrorists. By being “over there” we were making terrorists want to come “over here.” At least that’s what I suspected as the war dragged into its fourth year. I traveled to several countries to find out if the war in Iraq was feeding terrorism or, as the administration claimed, was keeping it at bay. Zarqa, a Jordanian city just across from the Iraqi border, was my first stop. It was al-Qaeda’s principal stronghold in Jordan and the birthplace of Zarqawi. Rarely visited by uniformed police, Zarqa was a place where Sunni hard-liners barely concealed their activities.