Crawling from the Wreckage (25 page)

This has been a dominant concept of Israeli strategy from the very foundation of the state, and the “kill ratio” in all of Israel’s wars, including its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 conformed to that pattern. The first time it didn’t apply was in the struggle between Israeli troops and Hezbollah during Israel’s prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, when the Israelis managed to kill only a few Hezbollah guerrillas for each of their own soldiers who died.

That steady drain of lives was the main reason the Israeli army pulled out of southern Lebanon six years ago, but many people in the Israeli defence establishment were concerned at the time that Israel’s “deterrent power” had been gravely eroded by Hezbollah’s victory. And subsequent clashes with the Palestinians did not see the old ratio restored: during the years of the so-called second intifada, only three Palestinians were killed for every Israeli.

Hence the perceived need within the Israeli armed forces to “re-establish deterrence,” that is, to demonstrate that Israel can and may respond with massively disproportionate violence even to minor attacks. The
IDF
wasn’t actually looking for a fight, but if a fight came along it intended to use
the opportunity to make a demonstration of just how big an overreaction it was capable of.

After a week of mutual bombardment—Hezbollah rockets against Israeli artillery and aircraft—Hezbollah still has at least three-quarters of its rockets left. A large part of northern Israel will remain under attack from the skies—not very accurate attack, but about one rocket in a hundred kills someone—unless the Israeli army is willing to occupy all of southern Lebanon again.

Even more worrisome for Israel is the fact that deterrence is not really being re-established. This is not just a hiccup; it is evidence of a slow but inexorable shift in the terms of trade. Israel will remain unbeatable in war for the foreseeable future, but the good old days of cheap and easy victories will not come back again.

I was wrong about one thing: the IDF
was
actually looking for a fight, and had made its plans for the war clear to its American allies. More about that later, but as the war neared the three-week mark, things were not going well for the Israelis
.

“Qana” refers to a bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft on the town of that name during the 2006 war that caused a building to collapse on top of dozens of civilians, many of them children, who had taken cover in the basement. Some forty were killed. (This should not be confused with the Israeli shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana in 1996, in which more than a hundred civilians who had taken refuge there were killed.)

The kill ratio is becoming a problem: Israel has been killing about forty Lebanese civilians for every Israel civilian who is killed. They are all being killed by accident, of course, but such a long chain of accidents begins to look like carelessness, and, even in Israel and in the United States, many people are getting uneasy about the slaughter. Elsewhere, the revulsion at what is happening is almost universal, and the death of so many women and children at Qana has greatly intensified the pressure on Israel and its de facto allies, the United States and Britain, to stop the war.

They are already making tactical concessions to lessen the pressure. Israel “partially suspended” its bombardment of Lebanon for forty-eight hours, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised to let the United Nations Security Council consider a resolution calling for a ceasefire this week. But Israel’s generals still want another ten days to two weeks of war to batter Hezbollah into submission, and neither Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or his allies in Washington and London are really willing to override them just yet.

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz told parliament on Monday that Israel cannot accept a ceasefire now, since if it did so then “the extremists [Hezbollah] will rear their heads again.” In response, the U.S. and British governments have to dodge and weave a bit as doubts grow at home about the morality and feasibility of Israel’s actions, but they can certainly arrange for the Security Council resolution to fail this week.

The real trick, in terms of keeping American and British public opinion on side, is to blur the sequence of events that led to the war and to present it as a desperate Israeli struggle against an unprovoked onslaught by thousands of terrorist rockets. As Prime Minister Tony Blair told the
BBC
, “It cannot be that Israel stops taking the action it’s taking but Hezbollah continue to kill, kidnap, and launch rockets into the north of Israel at the civilian population there.”

The website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs goes further, claiming that the operation in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldier and killed three others and the rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israeli cities were “simultaneous.” Obviously, these are mad terrorists who must be removed from Israel’s border at once and by any means possible. But unless “simultaneous” means “on the following day” in Hebrew, the website is deliberately distorting what happened.

There
was
an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on the Israeli army on July 12, seeking to kidnap soldiers who could be held as hostages and eventually exchanged for Lebanese prisoners who have been illegally held in Israel since the latter ended its eighteen-year military occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. And no doubt the reason Israel held on to those prisoners in the first place was to have them as hostages in some future prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. That’s how the game is played locally.

In the course of grabbing the Israeli hostages on July 12, Hezbollah fired rockets and mortars at the northern Israeli town of Shlomi as a
diversion, but nobody was hurt there. And apart from that,
no
Hezbollah missiles struck Israel that day. Indeed, none had been fired at Israel for at least four years, although there were regular skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters along the frontier. Hezbollah had the rockets, but they were not mad terrorists.

During the following twenty-four hours, however, Israel launched massive air strikes and artillery bombardments the length and breadth of Lebanon, striking Beirut airport, Lebanese air-force bases, the Beirut-Damascus highway, a power station, and all sorts of other non-Hezbollah targets and killing many civilians. It was only on July 13 that Hezbollah rockets begin to hit cities across northern Israel.

Nobody has clean hands here. Israel seized on the kidnap operation as the pretext for a massive onslaught aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s resources and removing it from southern Lebanon—a goal also implicit in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which called for all Lebanese militias to be disbanded, but not one that the
UN
had envisaged as being accomplished by Israeli bombs. Hezbollah may just have been trying to raise its profile in Lebanon and the wider Arab world with a small but successful operation that humiliated the Israelis—or it may have foreseen the likelihood of a massive Israeli overreaction, and calculated that it could ride it out and win from it.

Whether that was its intention or not, it probably will ride it out and win. Having fired at least ninety missiles at Israeli cities on every day but two since the war began—though they only kill an average of one Israeli a day—Hezbollah launched only two rockets on Monday (probably a crew that didn’t get the message to stop in time). If there should be a ceasefire in the next week, it will emerge the victor, since no international peacekeeping force is going to fight the kind of campaign that would be required to dig it and its weapons out of south Lebanon’s hills and villages.

And if there is no ceasefire, then the Israeli Defence Force will be granted a further opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot do so either. At least, not at a cost in Israeli soldiers’ lives that would be remotely acceptable to the Israeli public.

The war lasted thirty-four days but Israel made few ground advances into Lebanon. During the last few days before the ceasefire Hezbollah launched
twice as many rockets into northern Israel as its daily average in the first week of the war. It would be hard to maintain that Israel had successfully re-established deterrence
.

The three most ill-considered (and probably doomed) political enterprises on the international political scene today are the Israeli assault on Lebanon, the U.S. campaign to force Iran to renounce its alleged nuclear-weapons program, and the similar U.S. campaign that has been mounted against North Korea. What common theme unites these three enterprises? The quest of invulnerability for one side, at the expense of total vulnerability for the other.

Between 1945 and about 1970, the United States went through one of the most difficult intellectual and emotional transitions in history. The U.S. began that period as the home of almost half the world’s surviving industrial capacity and the sole possessor of the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. It was unchallengeable and invulnerable. Yet by 1970, it was ready to concede nuclear-weapons parity to the Soviet Union, an openly hostile totalitarian state, and was negotiating arms-control agreements that limited missile numbers but guaranteed the Soviets the ability to destroy the United States.

That was logical and necessary, because you couldn’t stop the Russians from building more and bigger nuclear weapons. America’s military thinkers had grasped the essential fact that no number of nuclear weapons on their side, however large, could stop an enemy with the ability to deliver even a few hundred nukes from effectively destroying their country.

The enemy would also be destroyed by U.S. retaliation, of course, so let’s work with that fact. Let us stabilize the U.S.-Soviet relationship by accepting this unavoidable situation of mutual vulnerability—Mutual Assured Destruction (
MAD
), as one critic of the policy named it—and even enshrining it in international treaties. It made good strategic sense, and it may well have saved the world from a nuclear war.

Accepting America’s vulnerability was so emotionally repugnant that many leading politicians and generals spent the rest of their careers
promoting new technologies like “Star Wars” that they hoped might restore U.S. invulnerability, but most of the U.S. political and military elite had the wisdom and maturity to support the policy. America could use their like today. So could Israel.

Israel’s period of invulnerability began later, after the 1973 war, and has lasted far longer. No combination of Arab armies can defeat Israel in war, or even inflict major casualties on it. And should Israeli generals ever prove so incompetent that Arab armies did make a little headway, Israel still has its regional nuclear-weapons monopoly forty years after developing the things. (America lost its own nuclear monopoly after only four years in its confrontation with the Soviet Union.)

Israel faces a bigger “terrorist threat” than the U.S., but this is still a pretty marginal concern. Hezbollah’s activities on Israel’s northern borders were an occasional nuisance, but until Israel’s quite deliberate overreaction to its hostage-seizure operation on July 12, it had not fired rockets at Israeli towns in years. Hezbollah had the capability to do so, and thus Israel was theoretically vulnerable (though not very, since the rockets hardly ever hit anyone), but it wasn’t actually doing it.

In one sense, this war is an absurd attempt to eliminate this last little vulnerability by grossly disproportionate means. In a more serious sense, it is driven by the Israeli military’s desire to re-establish deterrence: that is, to demonstrate anew that Israel can respond with grossly disproportionate violence to any provocation, spreading death and destruction far beyond the location of the original offence.

But that is another way of saying that Israel wants to show that everybody else in the region is completely vulnerable to its power, completely insecure. There is no stability in such a relationship, as the past forty years have amply demonstrated, and, in any case, this time deterrence will not be re-established. Israel is unable to eliminate Hezbollah, and its attack merely highlights the limitations of Israeli military power when deployed against non-state opponents.

The Lebanese government had no control of Hezbollah’s forces in the south and no say in Hezbollah’s operation to take Israeli troops hostage, which triggered the war. But Israel deliberately attacked Lebanese infrastructure and other targets not connected with Hezbollah in a deliberate attempt to make the non-Shia majority of Lebanon’s population see
Hezbollah as a threat to their own security. It did not succeed; just as in the Second World War, bombing civilians tends to strengthen their support for the government or other organization that is the real target of the enemy’s hostility
.

Nor was “deterrence” re-established on the ground. Hezbollah’s fighters were so well dug in that air power and artillery could not budge them. They were also so well trained that trying to dig them out with Israeli ground troops would be prohibitively expensive in terms of casualties, and the IDF wisely chose not to attempt it. Olmert’s government did launch what amounted to an airborne public-relations stunt on the day the ceasefire was signed, in an attempt to present the appearance of a victory. But those whose opinions really mattered were not fooled
.

Common sense has prevailed. Most of the Israeli troops who were sent into south Lebanon last weekend have already retreated, and the last thousand or two will be back inside the Israeli frontier by next weekend. They are not waiting for the Lebanese army and the promised international peacekeeping force to come in and “disarm Hezbollah.” They are getting the hell out.

The last-minute decision to airlift Israeli troops deep into the one thousand square kilometres of Lebanon south of the Litani river made good sense politically. That way, Israel didn’t have to fight its way in and take the inevitable heavy casualties. Rather, it simply exploited its total control of the air to fly troops into areas not actively defended by Hezbollah just before the ceasefire. The goal was to create the impression that it had defeated the guerrilla organization and established control over southern Lebanon.